


Replica

by MittensMcEdgelord



Category: Prey (Video Game 2017)
Genre: Other, Post-Game(s), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2018-11-21 18:34:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 38,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11363229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MittensMcEdgelord/pseuds/MittensMcEdgelord
Summary: Following the events of Prey, Project Cobalt yields the first successful attempt in a long series of experiments implanting mirror neurons in a Typhon. Outside of the rebuilt Talos station, humanity struggles to survive on the Martian and Lunar colonies. As the coral spreads, the pressure on the team behind Cobalt continues to grow.'Morgan' is now tasked with becoming the bridge between the two species, but first he needs to learn how to be human. It would be a daunting enough task without the phantom memories, the nightmares, and the increasing evidence that not everything is as it seems.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story assumes that readers know the 'secret ending' after the game's credits. It includes wild speculation on the actual events that happened on Talos 1, including who survived and the choices made by the original Morgan Yu. Attempts were made to stay faithful to the characters and new characters have been created to fill in holes in the faculty.
> 
> This is either going to be a painfully short or painfully long series depending on the author's whims. Everyone has been warned. Please enjoy.

I’m human.

I know it as well as I know anything else. I know I’m thirty one. I know my parents’ names. I remember playing video games with my older brother, who is kind of an asshole.

I know I’m human.

But today my body won’t come together. I go through the motions. I turn off the alarm clock. I answer the TranScribe and listen to Alex’s message. I go to the mirror. I check my eyes. Today all six of them are white and sparking with electricity.

“I keep having this dream,” I say. And I see the blackness between the stars. I feel the hate coursing through it, through the Coral. It’s staring back at me in the mirror and it takes everything in me not to run from it. Whatever it is that passes for a hand right now starts turning into a real one. First five digits appear, all the same length at first, and then they sort themselves out. The skin’s still black. It’s turning into my TranStar jumpsuit, but I guess at least that saves me the time it takes to get dressed.

“I keep having this dream. I’m staring at the blackness between the stars…” I press a finger against the skin under my eye, dark and puffy with lack of sleep. The sclera is red at first, but it fades to white. A red jumpsuit forms over a rough outline of a humanoid body. I take my first breath of the morning when I see the nametag on my chest: M. Yu. If I shut my eyes and relax, I can feel my lungs expand. I can taste the electronics that are still on from the night before, the rice cooker and PlayStation. The static crackling between my fingers fades away. The hair is always the last thing to form if everything isn’t already together when I wake up. It’s harder to get right than you’d think with all those strands. I lean forward and run a hand along the stubble on my face. 

“Good morning, Morgan.”


	2. March 15th

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A follow up piece to ‘Good Morning’. Morgan deals with an identity crisis, a persistent alarm clock, and some coworkers who aren’t entirely happy to see him.
> 
> Warning: Prey ending spoilers

Today is Monday, March 15th, 2032. It’s been March 15th for a while. I don’t know why I let the simulation play out every morning, but I do. I wake up to Alex telling me about mom and dad being in New York and how glad he is to have me on board. The water in the shower is always the right temperature. Breakfast is in the rice cooker. The coffee brews itself. Everything is perfect, the way only a simulated morning can go.

I’ve tried switching the song up on the alarm clock to see if that changed anything and a few weeks ago I put a post it note on the mug saying “This isn’t a mimic”. No one but me seemed to find funny. I should be sick of this simulation by now, given how the rest of the day went after it played out the first time. It’s comforting, though. Once I’m out the door, the name tag is just a courtesy.

I shift my skin, my suit, so that it looks a little closer to my figure. Too many memories of too many Morgans will mess up your self-image. Not all of the replicas were the same. There were some trials to determine what genetic and environmental variables produced the highest empathy quotient. I’m not sure what the results were, but no one told them that, human genes or not, all Typhon memories go into the coral. Eventually the other memories found their way into my dreams. I inspect myself again to make sure that I match the person in the video.

“I have never felt more like myself,” I say to my reflection. “I’ve never felt more like myself.”

The radio is still screaming at me as I grab my coffee, sit down, and replay the TranScribe. Once again Alex greets me and assures me that everyone wants me on the station. I go through the rest of his voice files in turn, putting off the 9 AM meeting that I know I don’t actually have. The alarm clock keeps reminding me anyway. Out of everyone here, Alex is the one that most wants me to be Morgan Yu. He’s the one I’m working for, in the end. He’s the reason I’ve been practicing vocalizations so I can stop communicating with everyone through cobbled together text to speech. Speech isn’t hard. Sounding like it comes naturally is. I spent most of last night watching that video of him and Morgan, the original one, so I could get things right. Igwe’s been helping me practice, too, though mostly offering such helpful tips as ‘try to remember to actually move your mouth when you speak’. I turn the coffee pot so that I can watch my reflection in it and repeat all of Morgan’s dialogue. It’s almost perfect. Today’s going to be the big reveal of my efforts. I’d say I can feel my heart racing, but we both know that that’s a lie. I feel something like anxiousness spreading into the weave around me, like I borrowed it from someone else in lieu of my own glands and neurochemicals.

“Good morning, Doctor Yu,” the simulated maintenance worker says as soon as I exit the front door.

“Good morning.” She can’t hear me, but I can hear me. I sound like Morgan. The world thrums around me, a feeling of unity, and I wonder if anything else is picking it up. That’s the hardest part. It isn’t the eating, the sleeping, the shape, or even the vocalizations. The hardest part is not being able to see people, really see them, the way you can through the coral. My TranScribe used to never be off. Everything that came into my head went through the speaker. Apparently, that’s not how people do it. It explains a lot about the Talos crew, though.

They can’t hear me think unless I put the words out there, but I can hear them. They’ve all installed a neuromod at some point, or most of them have. I’m not sure if they know what they sound like to me. I’m not sure I could even start to explain it. Everyone is a burst of light, color, sound, and emotion. Sometimes I pick up the small things. I see Sho singing on stage when she was seven, feel the way her insides twist when the person she’s looking for in the crowd isn’t there. I hear her singing to someone else after a few too many drinks at a gala and the emotion that comes after that is overpowering. If they found a way to transfer that into the weave, I think it would’ve worked as well as the NullWave Generator. The simulation fades once I step out of the hallway and, for a second, I’ve borrowed Sho’s neural output. The first person to greet me isn’t Alex. It’s Mikhaila.

“Dr. Yu,” she says. She’s never had a neural mod. She can’t. It makes her unreadable through the coral, but I’ve gotten the hang of human speech well enough to know she doesn’t like me. Her face twists until it looks like she’s shifting, then she takes a breath and speaks. “You’re late. Your brother wanted me to look in on you on my way to the office, though I don’t know why he couldn’t have just called you.”

“Sorry for the trouble, Mikhaila.”

She recoils at my voice and says something in a language I don’t yet know. Like that, she’s gone, her shoes pounding down the hall back to her lab. Her clipboard is still on the floor. When I reach for it, my hand isn’t mine. It isn’t even a hand. The way she looked at me shook something loose, something from the old Morgan. It feels like being cut off from the coral.

When I have that dream and I feel the blackness, the endless empty expanse between the stars, I know there’s something there. Knowing it’s there and that I can’t reach it, that the emptiness is what I used to be, is a feeling I’ll never get used to. When I’m around Officer Ilyushin, I get the same feeling. There’s something there and, no matter what I do, I’ll never be able to reach it or even understand it.

I go back to my room and contact Alex to tell him that I’m unable to come in today. He says he understands. He doesn’t ask why. He says the mimetic research labs might be able to help, if I feel like going down there. I’ll think about it, I tell him. The voice modulator sounds sincere. He knows I’m lying.

I let my body drift away from me until I’m the room itself. I wonder why I want to be human so badly. My survival depends on it, but their survival depends on me. I could walk out now, the way I am, and I’m not sure the people who know me would react differently. I think some of them would prefer if I did, if I quit ‘pretending’.

My hand reforms as soon as I hold it up, perfectly human. It feels right. It feels like mine.


	3. Cobalt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another day. The same day. It’s hard to tell.
> 
> A follow up to “Good Morning, Again”. Awareness is setting in and questions are coming to the surface. Who am I? How many of me have there been? And how the hell do you even eat udon?
> 
> ( Alternate Title: The Noodle Incident )

“Good morning, Morgan. Today is Monday, March 15th.” The alarm clock starts its routine, but doesn’t finish before it hits the kitchen counter with enough force to break the case. I didn’t lay a finger on it. The implications should worry me more than they do.

The illusion crackles as I sit up. The TranScribe tells me it’s closer to midnight than 7 AM. Something somewhere glitches. My room, empty of everything but a few pieces meant to make the simulation feel real, comes into view. I wonder if I’ve seen it like this before. I pick up the broken alarm clock and turn it over in my hands. It’s an easy fix. Ten minutes, maybe. I can figure out why it went off at midnight while I’m putting it back together, too.

Except that isn’t what I do. I put the clock on the counter, get dressed, and head to the cafeteria. I realize halfway down the grav shaft that I haven’t bothered to shave or brush my hair and laugh. I’ve never needed to shave. I never will. I catch my reflection in the glass, red eyes and stubble and hair in all directions. This is either rock bottom or the apex of my efforts. Either way, it’s exactly right for getting instant udon at midnight.

I’ve never actually had instant noodles. I’ve eaten it before in the simulation. It’s one of my—well, Morgan’s—favorite guilty pleasures. So, it seemed like an important thing to try. Lucky me, the cafeteria is nearly empty at this hour. One or two people who look less awake than I do are sitting at a table near the coffee pot, completely absorbed in paperwork. The cook doesn’t even seem surprised that I’m asking for instant udon, which either says a lot about Morgan or about the crew in general. What greets me is a nest of long, tendril-like noodles writhing in unnaturally colored broth, which I now have to eat with a pair of tapered wooden utensils that seem wildly unsuited to the task at hand. Nonetheless, I am not daunted. I am determined to consume this meal. This is, as my memories serve, one of the most quintessential Morgan Yu meals that I can find. I even have a can of Kafe Karsk to go with it, just to ensure authenticity.

A few minutes pass as I stare down the plastic bowl, willing it to divulge its secrets. None are forthcoming. Before I completely give up and take the armload of rations to my room, I see Sho sit down with a tray of unagi rolls. I grab my food and sit down across from her before she realizes I’ve even moved.

“What the fuck?” She drops the chopsticks onto the table and starts to stand. Her hand moves to her hip for a minute before she sits back down. She looks like she wants to punch me. Wouldn’t be the first time if the reports are any indication. “You shouldn’t do that. There’s a shoot on sight order for anything Typhon-like.”

“I didn’t mean to. It just sort of happens.”

“Phantom shifting just happens. Sure. You are really creepy. You know that, right?” She picks up a roll with the chopsticks and pops it in her mouth. I move closer to inspect only for her to shift a seat over. “Seriously, between that weird stretching thing you did between chairs and this, I’m pretty sure you’re not convincing anyone that you’re actually human.”

“I was trying to see how you used the chopsticks to eat. I would have installed a mod for it if I could have.” I poke at a piece of dehydrated eel floating in the broth. “Trust me, I searched the entire company directory of recorded skills. There’s nothing there.”

“Of course there’s not a neuromod for eating noodles, Mim. I don’t think anyone’s ever needed it. And before you ask I am not going to help you make one. Just do what everyone else does. Swear at the cheap useless chopsticks and slurp it out of the bowl.”

“Mim?”

“Yeah. I mean, we need something to call you. So, Mimic Morgan. Mim for short. It’s even on your official classified files.”

“Why not just ‘Morgan’?”

“Because you’re not Morgan, not to the people who know better. I know Alex programmed you to think you are, but you aren’t.” She snaps the chopsticks together and points them at me. “And before you ask, that’s a good thing. I can guess what you’ve been told, but contrary to what Alex and Igwe say, the station wasn’t exactly falling over itself worshipping Morgan’s brilliance and charm.”

She leans closer and almost knocks over my soup. I sit rigidly in place, trying to pretend I’m not thinking about shifting into a more innocuous object. She’s looking for something, somewhere that I’ve cracked open and the darkness is seeping through. I’m not sure if she sees it or not, but she leans back. “Do you actually think of yourself as him?”

“Yes.” My answer is too immediate, too emphatic. She snorts. “Why wouldn’t I? I know I’m not the same person, but how does that make me any less Morgan than he was after so many neuromod removals?”

“Because I’ve seen the recordings of your simulation. The real Morgan wouldn’t have done half the stuff you did.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he didn’t.” She slams her hands on the table and my noodles spill. I start sopping up the broth with the bundle of napkins the cook gave me. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Because he didn’t do one single thing you did, especially not destroy the station to buy Earth some time. If he did, maybe we wouldn’t be here still studying Typhons on Humanity’s Last Resort.”

“What did happen?” I reach into the bowl with my fingers this time, pull out a piece of dehydrated eel, and eat it. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the texture food is supposed to have. It’s possible that I’m wrong, but the way Sho is laughing says I’m probably not. I’m starting to think that instant noodles, as a whole, might actually be an elaborate joke that I’m not in on yet. “You said Morgan didn’t do the same things I did in the sim. No one’s felt the need to fill me in on what actually happened yet.”

“This isn’t a great time for this.”

”Why?” My voice crackles. I see Sho’s face contort at the sound. I take a breath, put my hands on the table in front of me, and try to relax my posture. I try to look as non-threatening as possible. She heard a Typhon; I don’t want her to see one. “Sorry. It’s just that it would mean a lot to me to know. We’re the only people in the cafeteria at this hour, so you don’t have to worry about anyone overhearing. And I don’t think you’d accept an invite to my dorm to tell me about it in private.”

“Okay. Fine.” She sits back and crosses her arms. Her mouth is pulled into a tight line. Pain is written across her face. I get an image of Abigail in the freezer. Of the escaped volunteer and his brain decorating the walls of the malfunctioning escape pod. She doesn’t make eye contact. “So, what happened on Talos 1. It was close to the simulation you were in. I nearly died, but you knew that. I got through a hatch before I actually did die. Barely. I ran into a weaver and some cystoids on the way in. My suit was so damaged it read my vitals as deceased. But I had to get back. I had to make sure the bastard that killed her paid. There was never a volunteer named Ingram to be saved. The fabricator in deep storage never got up and running to make any turrets. We had to make do. Only six of us survived. You’ve met five of them, either in proxy or in person.”

“Alex, Mikhaila, Igwe, Elazar, and you. Who was number six?”

“Morgan.” She waits, watching my expression. The name was acid coming out of her mouth. There was no love lost there, in spite of the familiarity she’d shown me so far. “He survived. For a while. Turns out after all those tests he was almost as much Typhon as human. When he triggered the null wave generator it wiped out all the Typhon on the ship instantly, big one included, but with him it worked slower. It wasn’t pretty, let’s leave it at that. I didn’t like Morgan, but he deserved better. Sure as hell didn’t deserve constant reincarnation as different Typhon.”

“Where do I come in?”

“After the world went to hell.” She pushes the last couple rolls aside. Any hunger I felt is gone too, replaced by something cold and heavy. Sho opens a can of Duck beer as she continues. It seems to do something for the hesitance she had earlier. “We didn’t know a shuttle with a mimic on it already landed earthside. We tried to keep ourselves quarantined until we realized it wouldn’t do any good. We fought. We ran. We mobilized. And once we were out here playing sentinel by the original breach, Alex started forming a plan. He used Morgan’s memories of the outbreak as a base. Said that disaster response was the best way to judge actions. Project Cobalt started. ‘A human Typhon hybrid to bridge our species.’ It was Morgan’s idea, even back before the containment breech, but we’d never been desperate enough to try it before now.”

“How many were there before me?”

“Too many. We were going to scrap it soon. The mirror neurons weren’t activating, not without a lot of intervention. And then you came along. You used all the Typhon mods you could find. You helped everyone you met. You tried to save us all. In a way, you were too human to be a real human. Alex said one of the variables was changed, but they changed every test. So, who knows. Maybe we just got lucky.”

“What was changed for my test?”

“Beats me.” She sighs and throws her hands out in front of her. The universal sign of ‘I’m done with this conversation’. The night shift is getting off pretty soon and the morning shift is getting ready to go on. Sho gives her now warm unagi rolls an annoyed look and pushes them to me. “There were a lot of variables. All classified. You’d have better luck asking Dr. Igwe.”

“Thank you.”

“Nothing a quick trip through the station’s history wouldn’t tell you.” She knows that isn’t the truth, but she shrugs it off like nothing anyway. I start to say something and swallow my words. There’s a shield around Sho’s mind like the kind a psychoscope generates, only this one’s not solid. It’s a mile of empty, unforgiving, airless space. She didn’t die outside the station like she did in the sim, but something did. Someone did. The woman talking to me is as much Danielle Sho as I am Morgan Yu. Finally, she breaks eye contact and grabs the half full beer can. “Last word of advice? Try to keep the Typhon powers low key. I’m not sure how many people actually believe the bullshit official story behind Morgan’s miraculous reappearance.”

Somewhere a chime sounds and the graveyard shift starts. She heads off to her station, beer still in hand, and doesn’t look back. That leaves me with her advice, her leftovers, and my now cold udon. Not to mention the host of new questions.

Alex never told me how Morgan died. Or when. I never really thought about how everyone accepted that I was here. The ones who don’t know about Project Cobalt just think I’m the second Yu sibling, a little worse for wear but not dead or inhuman. Sho knew. The survivors of Talos 1 know. I guess the better question is how no one else does.

The TranScribe beeps at me and shakes me out of my daze. The clock rolled back. The scheduled messages for 7 AM have are queued. The date is March 15th, 2032.

I hit the calendar button for the first time since I got it and tell it to synch with the station’s clock. I don’t know what date it finally registers. It’s forgotten in one of the pockets on my uniform by the time the update is done.

The udon is cold. It tastes like how eating instant noodles and a can of coffee alone at 1 AM feels. It isn’t good, but it’s familiar.


	4. The Human Condition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a Typhon discovers that most of the little things that make a human feel human are actually pretty unpleasant and still doesn’t get around to fixing the alarm clock.

I never questioned who I was until someone told me who I wasn’t.

I think I could have been Morgan. I think I could have worn his skin and used his voice and never realized I was doing either.

Now I doubt. Now I question. Am I him? Am I just a brainwashed Typhon? Maybe I’m something in between.

I’m hugging the broken alarm clock, knees to my chest and thoughts spilling out across the floor. Memories are laid out like tools. Though I don’t know what I’m trying to fix. I don’t notice Igwe. I don’t know he’s here until I hear Leitner and Talos one burns around me. I hold the clock tighter. He doesn’t say anything, just sits next to me. His thoughts are unraveling lines of sheet music, loneliness in A Minor. He misses her. He hates his hands, how clumsily they fumble at the Trois Gymnopedies when he thinks of her. He hates that pain makes him a worse musician instead of a better one. My mind fills the silence with broken piano notes and the broken sound of Mikhaila’s voice. I hear the plastic case of the clock fracture in my grip.

“You should talk to Katwe. It might help.” His hand rests on my shoulder in a gesture that’s supposed to be sympathetic. His fingers twitch. No one touches me. It’s an unspoken rule. Contamination. Typhon materials. I forget the official statement, but you don’t touch the test subjects without your suit providing a protective barrier. Most people just stick with don’t touch. His thoughts betray nothing, no reason why he’s ignoring the rules today. All I hear is music. “She’s a good doctor. I think Mr. Yu even gave her all of your files.”

“My files.” I laugh. He doesn’t think it’s funny. “Which ‘my’, Dr. Igwe?”

“Which ones do you think?”

I groan. For a second, I wonder what he’d do if I let myself come apart and revert back to ‘Typhon’. The only problem there is that I know my room is bugged and I also don’t know what I am when I’m not Morgan. Phantom? Mimic? Something else? I’m ruling out phantom because despite the human shape, I don’t have the secondary consciousness or memory echoes I’d have as a phantom. Assuming I’m not Phantom Morgan. But that seems like the first thing they’d have tried, not the last. Sho called me ‘Mim’. Mimic Morgan. I’m halfway through my mental archive of Typhon mimetic abilities when I realize he’s waiting for a reply. I set the alarm clock down and pretend I’m not bothered by the fact that it’s in pieces.

“Morgan Yu’s.” He frowns and I amend my answer. “Or the files on Project Cobalt?”

You’d think the fact that Alex never actually told me about it would give me the basic idea that he didn’t want me to know. What was that line about being resistant to good advice? I think it applies to basic common sense too. I realize I made a mistake when Igwe gets two shades too pale.

“The simulation.” Lying comes too easily. Guess I’m getting used to being human after all. “There were emails on the terminals in the simulation. One of the ones that Morgan was sending around was about a human Typhon hybrid.”

“That is true.” He nods and offers me an awkward pat on the shoulder. I’m breathing again. My focus is back. I relax a little more and let the natural mimetics take over. I copy his posture. I feel my face take on his expression. The good doctor seems reassured. “That, however, is not something I would discuss with Dr. Adesina. Mr. Yu wants to see how she evaluates you as yourself, as Morgan.”

“Another test?”

“Concern. You appear to have the full range of human emotions, though without the years of experience understanding them.”

“It was different in the simulation.”

“Very. Your brother and I disagreed on that matter, actually. He thought a disaster was the best way to test your empathy. I thought a more normal day would be better, evaluate interpersonal interaction and response to confrontation.”

“How does interpersonal interaction work when you’re not a person?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“It doesn’t.” I want him to hear the way she called me ‘Doctor Yu’. I want him to see her eyes. My thoughts crash around me, loud as thunder, and he can’t hear them. “What do you do when you know someone used to be there, but they’re gone? Not physically, but some other way. Or you know that everyone else knows you aren’t who they think?”

He laughs. It doesn’t sound happy. Age tears his face down and builds it back up as something softer, all the edges worn down and smoothed away. He changes in front of my eyes with a rapidity that I’m a little envious of.

“That, Morgan, is not the result of not being a person. If anything it’s one of the most human things you can experience. Grief. Self-doubt. I’ve felt both very acutely.”

“I don’t think I like it.”

“Then you have come to heart of the ‘Human Condition’ a lot faster than we thought you would.”

“It was hard for me not to.” My voice cracks. It isn’t inhuman. It’s still mine. But it’s sharp. “You put me in a sim. You had me save people. You made me care about them, made me think I was Morgan, and you didn’t think maybe after you unplugged me it would all still be there?”

Silence. If he has an answer, he doesn’t share. I think I know, from a purely scientific perspective what the answer is. Fiction. Catharsis. The reason humans don’t think they’re the player in a video game. What did Alex say when I first woke up? He was standing there with the operators, evaluating what I’d done.

“It probably thinks it was dreaming,” I say. It’s Alex Yu’s voice that comes out of my mouth instead of Morgan’s. “That nothing mattered.”

Still nothing.

“Its life depends on it thinking like us. Ours too. It all comes down to the choices it made.”

“Morgan, please.” His expression is still sympathetic, but this time there’s something else. Something familiar. Fear. He looks around the room before his eyes settle on the alarm clock. “What happened to your clock?”

Change of subject. Something less personal. Something less likely to cause a volatile reaction. It’s standard practice in diffusing a situation. I pick up one of the broken pieces and turn it over a few times, catching my reflection in the display. It isn’t quite Morgan but it isn’t really anything else. I shut my eyes and squeeze the broken plastic, willing myself to register the change of pressure as pain. When it doesn’t work, I think about Mikhaila.

“I threw it. Psychically. I was mad about the date.”

“The date?”

“March 15th. 2032. It’s stuck.”

“I’m sure Mr. Yu can arrange for a new one. One that will tell the correct date and time.”

“Yeah.” My body’s solid again. Whatever was disintegrating at the core is back to normal, or at least functional. “You were one of the ones who made the final call. That scored my empathy quotient. Right?”

“I’m not sure what that has to do with your clock, but yes.”

“What tipped it in my favor?”

“The files you gave Officer Ilyushin. You did it without hesitation, even though you knew it would change the way she looked at you. The connectomes were another thing. The medicine. How you handled Volunteer 37 and spared Ingram. It was a long list. Even though you used Typhon neuromods somewhat indiscriminately, your actions overall pushed things heavily in your favor. Even the Typhon powers were used in a human way, to break telepathic control on crew members.” He clears his throat and stands up. He’s professional now. I wonder how many times he’s run through the list since the test ended. “In the end, I think it’s part of human nature to want to be a hero, no matter how great the risk. Destroying that reputation for the sake of truth is another matter entirely. It is something most humans are not willing to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my favorite chapter so far. Probably because I am a bad person and I enjoy making Mim suffer.


	5. Phantoms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yet more of the mimic story wherein Morgan discovers a recording of a Fatal Fortress game, learns something new about his former self, and makes plans to avoid a doctor’s visit. ( And where I attempt to lighten the mood after the last update but fail horribly. )

I feel like I know them. If I shut my eyes, I can hear their thoughts pulse through the coral, the subtle vibrations of memory ghosts. I’ve spent the whole day listening to a backlog of employee recordings from Talos 1 that were ejected when the apex Typhon attacked. Alex held onto them in the hope that maybe, eventually, we’d find their surviving family. I’m sure it wasn’t purely altruistic. There are plenty of logs that are scientific, bits and pieces of Bellamy’s work or employees showing off their new neuromod skills. There are more that aren’t. I told him I wanted to study people, try to understand how they work. It took a lot of convincing and some shameless playing of the ‘little brother’ card, but I got access to the files.

The memories I have don’t go back far enough to remember the boltcaster fights or the Fatal Fortress games. Not that I think either Yu was ever invited to join in. It sounds like it was a different world back then. The crew is still relatively optimistic. There are still dart gun fights. There’s a different color to it now, though. There’s no Yellow Tulip, for one. Which means that there’s a distinct lack of drunken karaoke and that I will never get to hear Sho sing off key love songs outside of TranScribe recordings. And after the invasion I don’t think anyone is in the mood for drunken karaoke anyway. Now that they’ve encountered Typhon, humans are becoming a little more like them in order to continue. The priority is survival, at all costs, and everything else is frills.

So, it’s a pleasant surprise when I come across a second recording of Sho singing, this time completely sober. It’s the song she performed during the big show to promote musical neuromods. There’s a few other voices laughing and applauding. Someone wants to know where she even got a banana to use as a microphone. Someone else is teasing her for taking the ‘role play’ aspect of the game too seriously.

“I didn’t realize you dual classed as a bard,” the DM quips. I recognize the voice as Abigail Foy’s from the simulation. “Alright, you get 10XP for that performance. And…”

I hear shuffling and more laughter. Sho groans. There’s clapping all around the table again before the DM clears her throat and continues triumphantly.

“You also earn ten gold from the audience.”

“Hey,” a male voice interrupts. He’s doing his best to sound offended, but it’s obvious he’s not. Something slides across the table. “When I performed I only got silver coins. And I’m an actual bard.”

“Yes, but she actually sang,” Foy says matter-of-factly and taps something on the tabletop.

“So did I.”

“Poorly. Besides, we all know it’s because Abby thinks our new player is cute.” Someone laughs. High pitched. Female. A hint of an accent I don’t quite recognize.

“I’m cute,” he protests. I have to put a hand over my mouth so I don’t laugh louder than the recording. The other players are enjoying it too. He must have done something because a sharp peal of laughter comes through the speaker.

“Really, Chang? You’re trying to get Foy to say you’re cute?”

“And you’re only filling in for Elias for tonight.” The second male voice scoffs. “What do you really XP and gold for?”

“It’s the principle.”

“Oh my god,” Sho laughs. “Can someone please just tell Chang he’s cute so we can get on with it? Zack? Emma?”

“Don’t look at me,” the second male voice says. “Besides, I thought he were busy swooning over Dr. Yu? Or is it just a coincidence that your password is ‘OMGhotboss’?”

“How did you even know that?”

“It’s on a post-it note on your desk. It’s more of a surprise that anyone on the station doesn’t know it.”

I wonder if Morgan ever noticed it. I remember in the sim I saw it almost immediately. He wasn’t exactly trying to hide it. Morgan must have walked past his work station every day and caught a glimpse of it. The ‘devastatingly handsome’ line on his psychoscope profile makes a lot more sense now. Jason Chang was dead by the time the simulation started, though. There weren’t a lot of recordings, either. He had unrestricted access to the office during the testing, which seems like a lot of power for a secretary. Given the office I remember was mostly filled with useless junk, a few books, and a stash of moonshine there probably wasn’t too much to worry about. Another player—Emma, I’m assuming—interrupts my train of thought.

“Does this have to do with that time at the Yellow Tulip?”

“You mean the New Year’s party?” Sho sounds smug as she asks. She knows the answer, but clearly wants to hear it from Chang.

And this is when the audio runs out. I might have yelled ‘damn it’ when the playback stopped, but now at least I know which files to search through for the other game logs. I am, however, left with a significant amount of unanswered questions. Particularly about the New Year’s party in question.

“How’s it going, Morgan?” Alex’s voice cuts in over the TranScribe. Responding to higher levels of brain activity, maybe. I’m sure whoever monitors my data feed has been getting some interesting response levels.

“Great.” I’m a little too enthusiastic in responding. I also just found the next log for this session courtesy of Emma Beatty’s ‘IMPORTANT MEETING NOTES’ file.

“That’s great.” He sounds genuinely happy about that. Considering what a mess my first few days interacting with the crew have been like, I can’t blame him. I hear footsteps on the other end of the line briefly before Alex comes back in. “I’m glad the files are useful. Learning anything interesting?”

“A little. Wish there was more data on some of the employees. Emma. Zachary. Jason. The latter particularly.”

“Jason Chang?” He snorts. It’s almost a laugh. “You were drinking buddies. Or something like that. He’s probably why your entire stash of moonshine was missing when you finally made it to your office.”

I make an executive decision not to mention the “hot boss” thing. Or the party. Alex sounds like he’s impatient to get to the topic he actually called about. I load up the next recording and let it buffer while I wait. He gives me a few seconds to type before continuing ahead.

“You think you’ll be ready to go face the world again soon?”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“Doctor Igwe told me you were having some trouble with your mimetics the other day.”

“I wasn’t feeling great. Some people cry, I turn into wispy black sentient smoke. Kind of a weird trade off.”

“Morgan, try to be serious.” When he says that, I can actually hear him taking his glasses off and pinching his nose. The first Morgan must have been a real joy to work with if that’s such an innate reaction in him. “If you think that’s going to happen again, I need you to be honest with me. We’ve never monitored extreme emotions in Typhon before. It could be a natural reaction to stressful stimuli.”

“It might. I’m still getting the hang of things.” I’m aware of what a vast understatement this is, but I want Alex to have some faith in me. His optimism about the project is contagious. I’d rather not lose that. I take a breath, hold it for a second, and let it out. My thoughts clear. “If it happens again and I start to change, what do I do? Head back up here?”

“Or the Typhon Research Lab if you can’t get to the grav shaft. Dr. Park knows about your situation. She’ll help.” He pauses. Something clinks against glass. “She actually wanted to schedule an appointment with you for a physical exam, but it didn’t seem like a good idea right now.”

“What kind of physical?”

“DNA stability, mostly. See if the dosage of psi hypos you’re getting is right or if you need any more cell lines to balance things out.” Another pause. I wish I could hear thoughts over TranScribe, but no such luck. Alex makes a small humming noise. “This isn’t about what happened the other day, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s all routine. Well, it’s going to be a routine. We’ve all got a lot of adjusting to do, but I think once we start getting things back to something like normal it’ll start going a lot smoother.”

“Yeah.” Now I’m a little glad you can’t project thoughts through a TranScribe. I’m pretty sure fear of doctor’s visits isn’t something I’m supposed to have. The name Bellamy comes to mind, a swirl of respect and regret, and I remember that I saw his corpse in the sim. I tune out just long enough to get my mind in order and come back to myself to catch the end of Alex’s explanation of the examination procedure.

“I’ll make arrangements with Dr. Park when you’re feeling up for it,” he finishes. I get the feeling that’s going to be never. The way my body works is as alien to me as it is to anyone else on the station and I’m not sure I want to know the result of a physical, let alone take one. I start to tell Alex that, but think better of it. Silence hangs on the other end of the line producing the kind of gravity specific to situations you don’t want to be in. Glass clicks against one of those gaudy, TranStar coasters. Alex sighs. “Morgan, listen. I know it’s been rough, but you’re doing great. I want you to know that.”


	6. April

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mim questions the nature of reality as he tries to identify emotion flashcards and make sense of the Talos 1 TranScribe data. The recordings have given him enough insight into humanity to identify emotions and their causes, though with limited success. This wouldn’t be a problem if that was all they contained. Hidden amid the trove of Fatal Fortress campaigns and employee memos is a recording from Morgan that details a project meant to operate concurrently with Cobalt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for the lack of recent updates, readers. Hopefully the update schedule should get back on track.  
> (If anyone has read this on Tumblr, it has undergone updates and edits. Thank my tireless editor for translating my nonsense into coherent story.)

Day four of self-imposed dorm arrest and I’m still trying to figure out what caused me to snap like that at Igwe. I’ve been going through employee files and recordings, learning as much as I can about human emotions and their causes. I wanted to find an explanation for what I was feeling and why. It all comes back to the original test.

I feel like I’m supposed to hate them for what they did. Part of me does. I’m still pissed off over what Sho said about the events of the simulation. It’s bad enough they tried to convince me I was Morgan, only to have it acknowledged on a regular basis that I’m not only not him but not even human. I don’t know how much of the crew knows what I am. I don’t even know what I am. I’m sure there’s a safety reason for all of that, or so I keep telling myself. What really gets to me is the fact that the simulation was based on a different version of Morgan’s past. That’s a little harder to cope with. 

How much of it was true? How much was just another variable in the test? Sho is alive. Most of the others aren’t. Did Dahl even exist? What about the Advent shuttle? And why did Alex never tell me any of this? 

I don’t like not knowing. There’s only so much that I can justify as necessary security protocol. I look through Igwe’s emotional intelligence flash cards again and arrange them as another recording buffers. Anger. Sadness. Fear. Confusion. I mix up anger and joy again. The bared teeth throw me off. I draw the faces in my notebook and start writing down the causes of the emotions. It’s all the same. The whole ‘cause’ row is a question. 

“What is real?” I look at the two way mirror, as if expecting an answer from one of the observers. If they know what I am or what’s hiding on the other side of the looking glass, their minds betray nothing. Today Sokolov and Ayala are quiet, their thoughts muted waves of color without sound or heat. I give up on a response and turn the page. A half formed list entitled ‘Things I Know’ stares back at me. Every item has been crossed out at least once. Some have been rewritten. Most haven’t. The only things I know for a fact right now are that Morgan didn’t destroy Talos 1 and didn’t die during the events of the sim. He tried to destroy the Typhon and save his coworkers. He knew that the station’s research and crew were priority. The world was doomed no matter what. I remember the emails and the shuttles from the simulation. I remember thinking that what mattered was getting everyone to safety because the Typhon were probably already on Earth. If Morgan read the same things I did, he would have reached the same conclusion.

There were a few disjointed messages from Morgan with the rest of the employee files that backed up my theory. Most of them were speculation on Typhon biology or how to use it to a restore a damaged brain to a previous state. He thought he’d cracked it. I’m not sure if he ever implemented it, though. What he did manage was an almost complete neural emulation, an operator that was more of a person than a shallow imprint of someone’s current mental state. It was called April. Unfortunately, due to severe synaptic deterioration from the removed neuromods and the nullwave device, the entire thing was faulty. April was the absolute last ditch effort of Morgan Yu to preserve his mind, but it was still something. If the Typhon made it to Earth, the only way to undo the damage would be to continue the nullwave research. He wanted to make sure that he was there to work on it, in one form or another. It stated in the recording that at the time of his death two things were supposed to happen: Project Cobalt would go into effect and April would be put into action to continue work on a “Localized Psychotropic Stabilization Field”. The plans for both things were supposedly given to Alex. I know, at least, that Project Cobalt was a go.

So where is April, then?


	7. Mind Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a few days of contemplative solitude and the realization that there was more left behind by his predecessor than just research notes, Morgan goes looking for answers. He heads straight to the one person he thinks understands his predicament as well as he does: Alex.

“Is there a way to implant memories into someone instead of skills?” I’m sitting in front of Alex’s desk, watching him work at his station. He’s got the same expression as always, the one that clearly says he’s sick of administration. When he finally processes what I said he moves to face me and turns his monitor off.

“What kind of memories?”

“Mine.” I pause and amend the statement. “Morgan’s. I only have a few days worth of memory from before Talos. It’s weird.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“Yes.”

“You want to just be human?” He sounds disappointed, though his face is inscrutable. His posture relaxes as he looks over the top of his glasses at me. “Or do you want to think you always were?”

“I already do. More or less. Typhon don’t have a ‘self’, not the way you think of it.” I’m suddenly acutely aware of the ticking of his antique clock. It’s almost in time with his heartbeat. I’m talking without thinking. My mind is muddled. It won’t filter between thoughts and voice. “They’re a single self. Never an ‘I’. Always a ‘we’. Before I was who I am now, I wasn’t anything. I was shadow and hunger and some vaguely defined anger. That isn’t a lot to really build on. The only ‘self’ I’ve ever had is this one.”

“So you want to be Morgan Yu?”

“That’s who I already am, isn’t it?” I shift in my chair. I can’t read him, not his expression or his thoughts. I think I understand panic now. I’ve gotten used to my new biology, all the little human details. I feel something about them shift. A quickening of movement inside me, like my body is trying to figure out if I should change into something else or move out of the room. I have never felt like this around Alex before, but I’ve also never been inside his office before. I don’t notice I’m tapping my hands against my thighs until I see his eyes drift down to them. Tap, tap, pat. Tap, tap, pat. Fingertips, fingertips, palms. It’s a familiar rhythm, stabilizing.

“Yeah,” Alex finally says. He smiles at me and tilts his head, some emotion I can’t yet identify flickering across his face. It reminds me of Igwe when he plays the piano. “Yeah, you’re right. In a sense, that’s who you already are. You have all the memories Morgan would have after the tests, minus some of the fundamentals. You respond to situations the way he would. The way the original one would. You’re more like he was when we first started this venture than he was at the end of it. Sometimes I forget you aren’t him, go to talk about Ms. Zhou and her damn yappy dog or rib you about video games.”

I don’t know what words to say in this situation. I saw the videos of him and Morgan. They looked like they were happy. The way he acts around me a lot of the time is like a sibling is supposed to act. He still laughs when I take the place of his coffee mug during visits, though I’ve probably done it a few dozen times by now. And now he watches intently as I fumble through my mental lexicon of ‘things Humans say in emotional situations’, unable to pick anything out. It’s absurd that this is so hard when picking up Morgan’s research was so easy. I want to ask him why, but I already know the answer to this one: neural synchronization. I studied all of the parapsychological research for the neuromods and I know that you can pick up bits and pieces of the personality of the one that recorded them. The more pieces of Morgan that are put into me, the more I absorb of who he was. I’ve found the remains of January’s programming in the archives and picked apart all the little things that made the operator what it was. The same goes for December. Turns out, the first Morgan wasn’t very good with words either. So, I sit here dumbfounded and hoping Alex knows where he’s going with this conversation.

“Morgan made some back ups, July through January, but none of them would have what you’re looking for.” Alex takes his glasses off and rubs the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t mention April. I start to ask, but stop. Alex wanted Morgan back more than anyone. If there was an operator, a recent one, that could give him his brother again, he’d have taken that opportunity. Maybe April never got finished. Maybe he heard it and dismissed it, the ravings of a madman slowly being eaten by his own Typhon mods. I try to steady my hands as I watch him. A scream is building in my chest, the kind that comes from not knowing how much you don’t know. He sees it and disarms me in an instant, reaching across the desk to put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you. There’s no way to get it all back. I could talk about our childhood or recount Morgan’s college hijinks until I’m blue in the face, but all that’d be is me telling you stories. It’s not quite the same as real memories.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. The paranoia set in pretty early during the testing, though. It’s possible that a full copy was made, but even then there’s no way it would’ve made it off of Talos 1.”

“What do I do?”

“What you’ve been doing. Who knows, maybe you’ll find something in his research.” He slouches in his chair and sighs. “Listen, Morgan, you’re you. I don’t care what anyone else tells you. You’re as human as anyone here. Anyone who’s had a neuromod has Typhon in them and that’s most of the people on this station. For Christ’s sake, you’ve got a higher EQ than half the research division. Not that that’s saying much. You’re a good human. More than that, if the sim was any indication you’re also a good person. I’m honored to have you as part of the crew.”

I want to believe him. I want to more than anything. Except his thoughts are completely blocked off. My senses are dull, muted to something almost less than human. And I want to believe that he has no idea about April and that he considers me part of the crew, but I swear I’ve felt this kind of neural dampening before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How are you even supposed to communicate without telepathy? Just intuit what people mean from their voice and facial expression? Who does that? No one. It is surely madness.
> 
> In other news, updates will likely be delayed due to moving and classwork. Wayward Chronicler works hard to make sure all of my updates are readable and coherent, but even he cannot magically make me write. (He could if he gave me coffee, though. That is a hint.)


	8. The Truth Will Set You Free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth will set you free, but lieu of truth a different kind of lie can suffice.
> 
> Exhausted of vague plans and repetitious assurance, Mim seeks out Mikhaila in the hopes of getting answers no one else will give him. What he finds are more questions, ones with far sharper edges than he bargained for.

_You’re a good human._

_You’re a good person._

_You’re as good as Morgan._

_You’re better than Morgan._

It’s not that I’m not flattered, but I’m starting to think everyone is reading off of the same script. Igwe. Sho. Alex. Especially Alex. I’ve had that conversation with my brother so many times it’s starting to feel like part of the old sim. I used to think it was guilt over Morgan, but it isn’t just him. Almost everyone has the same thing to say to me. I haven’t spoken to Elazar yet, not privately, but the group emails and security memos were enough. It’s strange, to say the least. I haven’t been out of containment long enough to make that much of an impression, unless they’re all going by my responses in the sim. The Morgan I was in there probably deserved all the compliments I get. There are too many holes in that theory, though.

My sense of self-preservation is screaming at me. It picks threads out of the weave and tries to tie them together into something more solid. There was something in Alex’s office that hid his thoughts and brought me crashing down into myself. I can’t blame him. I’m a Typhon. I’m wearing Morgan’s skin, but I know what I am. He has every right to be afraid after what happened on Talos. It’s a reasonable, human response to a potential threat and I could ignore it if it didn’t feel like déjà vu. I’ve had that disassociated, claustrophobic feeling before. I didn’t tell Alex. If he’s going to keep things from me, I might as well return the favor. From now on, any new memories or feelings that surface are mine alone.

I’m halfway down the shaft to the cafeteria when it finally hits me what that feeling was: The psychoscope. I put it on once. Only once. It was like having my thoughts wrung out of me until there was nothing left. I remember shaking, fumbling at the clasps to get it off. I blacked out at some point. That isn’t in any of my notes, though. All of the emails I found about psychoscopes are just Alex telling the people in the lab that I don’t need to wear one when I come down. I watch the lights, consider just hitting the button to take me back up to my room, and let it keep going.

I’m walking out of the grav shaft mechanically. I’ve fallen into a routine again, even without the sim. At least it’s a routine of my own design. Every midnight I come down for udon and a can of coffee. I sit by myself near the vending machines. I listen to the other voices and absorb them. I know a lot of movies now. I know how to use chopsticks. I breathe in the collective consciousness of Talos 2 as if it could sustain me. Typhon feed on thought. In a way, I still do. I’m learning how to blend in. It’s a type of social mimesis, when you get down to it. I pick an employee at random, a young woman in a researcher’s uniform, and copy her affect. Before long I’m at ease, moving my fingers to a song I’ve never heard and humming. I look up from my noodles every few minutes, a second after she does, and stare expectantly at the nearly empty cafeteria. I’m not sure if I’m actually expecting someone, but I see Mikhaila out of the corner of my eye and something clicks.

I need to talk to Mikhaila. She might not tell me everything, but she’ll tell me a different lie than the others. Maybe between them I can find the truth. I wish I could read her. I want to know why she tries so hard to look through me. Is it Morgan? Alex? Was she there when they put me together and did she see something they didn’t?

“Doctor Yu,” she greets me as I sit down. One of the employees next to her, another researcher, looks away before leaving the table. His eyes never meet mine. I hear whispers. The people at the table are gone. Mikhaila continues to watch me. I’m shaking when I set the notebook down. My suit ripples along my hands like water and she’s polite enough not to say anything, though I see her clench her jaw. The weave is filled with her coworkers’ thoughts, hazy memories of a newscast about Talos 1 and the evacuation of earth to the martian colonies.

“Still putting off your doctors’ appointments?” Her tone is accusatory. It’s a welcome change, though I wish it was from anyone but her. I don’t have to answer. I guess the look of shame is enough. Her lips tighten together and the corners of her mouth drop. Her eyes are soft. “You can’t keep doing that. You know there is a very good reason they schedule those.”

She catches herself and bites her lip. Anger and embarrassment blossom across her face before fading. I wonder who she’s wearing. Whose skin got pulled on over Mikhaila Ilyushin’s? Her eyes move to my hand and I scramble to make the fingers divide into individual digits again.

“And this is why you go to your appointments.” She drums her fingers on the table, spinning strands of gold thread where her emotions leave her. I touch one and pull it towards me, only for it to break. Mikhaila is staring at me, mouth open and a million silent words spilling out. I pick up my can of tea to make sure my reflection is still human. It is. When I look back up her jaw is set. “How many psi hypo do you use per day? On top of the water filters you have. Do you know?”

“One or two. It depends on what I’m doing. More interaction with the crew means more hypo.”

“You need them to be human.” It sounds like it’s a question, but her expression says she doesn’t want me to answer. She knows. I do. I run out, I stop being Morgan. I stop being Morgan, I become something else. Something that is going to have to actually feed instead of just drink a pitcher of tap water infused with psychotropic particles every few hours. I try to maintain eye contact, but her gaze is piercing. “You know what those hypo are, don’t you?”

“I know. And I appreciate the irony of consuming typhon material in order to stay human.” I attempt a smile. It’s too wide. Too many teeth. I can feel how wrong my mouth is. Her fear moves beneath the surface of her face and I stop smiling. I come apart near her. I think Morgan did too, but in a different way. My hands move through the table. I don’t feel the bench under me anymore. Something whispers inside my head. I used to know the language it speaks, but now it’s nothing but a scratching noise and empty light. I nearly jump out of my seat when something slams against the table next to my hand. The can of green tea is crumpled in Mikhaila’s fist. The fear is gone. Anger. This one is anger.

“You have no idea what you’re doing here, do you?”

“Talking to you.” I run my tongue across my teeth, feel them smooth out and arrange themselves in order. My body is heavy, more solid than it’s been in days. I don’t like it. It has to stay this way until I leave, though.

“On Talos,” she amends. “You have no idea what you’re doing on Talos.”

“Alex said I was some kind of bridge between species. We’re working the details out.” I smile properly this time. It doesn’t help.

“When did you learn to write?” The question comes out of nowhere. She must have seen me taking notes on what she said. When I don’t answer the first time, she repeats herself. This time her words are bright, sharp. They burrow under my skin and give off sparks. I stare down at the notebook in front of me, the endless list of things that I think I know alternately underlined or crossed out. “You can’t use chopsticks, but you have Morgan’s handwriting. Do you know why?”

“The cell lines?” Unsure. I sound unsure. She has a point and I don’t like it. I have to fight to keep myself as me. I imagine Morgan. I replay his voice in my head, telling Alex about growing a pair and committing. I replay his sense of self-assuredness and resignation. I take a deep breath as I straighten my posture. “Phantom memories aren’t the best studied side effect of Typhon modification, but they’re known to happen. It’s likely I only got a fraction of what Morgan knew from the experiment, the things that were important to him.”

“You can’t fake his arrogance,” she snorts. “Morgan was arrogant because he was smart, because he worked hard to use that intelligence. And because he wouldn’t understand humility even if you installed it in him with a mod.”

My thoughts are screaming. They warp everything in my vision, pulling away at the threads I try to carefully gather around me. My glove stops existing. She notices it, but her expression remains the same.

“Ask Alex why you know how to write. And while you’re at it, ask him why he goes along with your insane desire to live in a simulation still.”

“I don’t.” I hear the hum of the coral and, somewhere deep inside it, I hear my own voice echoed back to me. It sounds different than Morgan’s. Arrogance, but without the barbs. “I turned it off. Broke the clock. Reset my transcribe to sync with the station’s calendar. I spent too much of my life in a simulation already.”

She smiles, but it isn’t kind. I’m getting the idea that Igwe’s Emotional Intelligence flashcards are full of lies. Every time I’ve seen someone smile, it hasn’t been happy. I don’t copy her. I feel my jaw tighten and my eyes lose focus. There’s empty space around her where the weave should be, those intangible threads that haven’t been made into solid coral yet. I can feel myself pulsing through them, my thoughts an invisible heartbeat for something much bigger than I am. And I can feel the threads tangle together. I exhale. She’s still smiling. I’ve decided I don’t like that expression. Humans have it all wrong. Animals bare their teeth to display a threat, but here they are thinking that it means friendship. The cards are lies.

“What did I do to you?” There’s an echo in my voice, a crackle of static electricity. I shut my mouth and hope it was too quiet for the rest of the cafeteria to hear. It sounded like a phantom’s speech.

“You? Nothing. Not this time. Not this you.” She regards me with the same rigid smile, the same bared teeth. Just once, the weave pulses around her and I hear the darkness move. “But maybe you should ask about the other ‘Mim’.”

I want her to be lying. I want to tell her that she’s lying, that I know she’s saying this to hurt me because of some unfinished business with Morgan, but I remember the dreams.

“You are so much like him, you know that? Maybe you can’t fake his mannerisms, but he’s still part of you.” She scoffs and glances at the table where Sho is. I should be over there with her, splitting a plate of eel rolls and talking about the latest batch of Fatal Fortress recordings I found. My feet won’t move, no matter how much I tell them to. Mikhaila turns back to me. “So quick to believe you’re a savior, that ends justify means. I’m sure they’ve told you otherwise. They always do. But how quickly did you believe them when they said you were the only one, the last great hope of humanity?”

“Did anything I did in that simulation mean anything, anything at all to you?”

There’s a pause. The world hums, gets desaturated. All I can hear is the first time I saw her outside of the sim and the way her voice sounded when she called me ‘Dr. Yu’. A thread breaks somewhere. My vision refocuses and, even though I know I haven’t shifted, I see the way I used to. There’s too many angles riding too close to each other. Starbursts of thought radiate around her, none of them hers. When she finally speaks, it’s deafening.

“It meant that we tailored the testing variables right and adjusted your composition accordingly. You were a very receptive test subject.”

“If you don’t like having a…” I stumble, my thoughts flicker away into the coral. I breathe in deep through my mouth and focus on Morgan. “If you’re so set against a Typhon based replica, why not just use an operator like April?”

She doesn’t reply. Her eyes widen slightly and any emotion on her face disappears. As soon as I open my mouth again, she gets up and leaves. Her half finished dinner is left behind, along with her TranScribe. I shouldn’t have mentioned April. What did I think she’d do, sit back down and tell me a tragic story about a rogue operator? No. That wouldn’t be reasonable. I know she won’t tell me and that’s why I don’t follow her. I know enough to know that.

I pick one of the blini from her tray as I wait for my body to forget Mikhaila’s presence. The threads are still moving, straining under the weight of my own scattered thoughts. I knew there were others. She told me nothing I didn’t know. So why does it bother me?

I pick up the box of blini and stare at it for a while. I never learned Russian. I couldn’t have, not in the few weeks I’ve been awake. The Cyrillic letters come to me naturally. The names of the ingredients, the information, the slogan, and the Russian regalia are all familiar. I have never eaten blini. I never learned Russian.

I don’t remember learning how to write either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so long. I am so sorry. This update has been sitting in my documents, waiting for wayward-chronicler to edit it for the 25th time before I posted. And somehow it kept getting longer.


	9. Do No Harm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mim finally follows through on seeing the station psychologist and discovers she's not the looming horror he was expecting. Hopefully the same can be said for his primary physician...

“That one’s a phantom,” I sigh as Dr. Adesina holds up another card. “And that’s a mimic. The next one is going to be a Typhon too. Is that what they all are?”

“Actually, no.” She’s frowning at her clipboard as she marks down my responses. “You’re right about the mimic, but the others were random shapes. Most people think the ‘phantom’ one is a cherry tree.”

“Sorry. I’ll get the next batch right.”

“There’s no right or wrong, Dr. Yu. The point is to see what kind of images your mind conjures from arbitrary ink splotches. It’s a quick way to assess what’s on someone’s mind.” She sets the stack of papers down and flips the paper on her clipboard. “I think we can safely say that you have a lot of residual trauma from Talos 1, which is hardly surprising. Every answer led back to it. Wrench. Space Shuttle. Weaver. Coral. Phantom. And chair, which you insisted was a mimic.”

“It looked like a mimic. A chair floating off the ground like that is always a mimic.” It isn’t always a mimic. I know that. But something about being here and doing these tests reminds me of the simulation. I find myself defaulting to Morgan, the Morgan who wandered alone through the Typhon-infested halls of Talos-1 with GLOO canon in hand. I know there aren’t any mimics on the station outside of the mimetic labs, myself excluded, but sometimes I still check shadows to make sure that mugs or trash cans are flush with the ground. My hands are moving automatically against my legs in that familiar rhythm. The doctor is watching, but she hasn’t said anything. I curl my hands around my knees to stop the motion. “It’s a nervous habit.”

“Tell me, how do you usually deal with stress in everyday life?”

“Emotional stress or interpersonal?”

“Either.”

“Sometimes I turn into a mug and just stay that way. Mugs don’t really have any responsibilities. I get to be inanimate, outside of myself, and just think.”

“You turn into a mug?” She lowers the clipboard and looks at me. Her eyebrows are raised and her lips are curled upwards just slightly. It’s the first non-threatening smile I’ve seen other than Igwe’s. I relax enough that my peripheral senses fade in. She sounds like light and, around her, there’s a million threads humming. She only has a couple neuromods to help with computer aptitude, they barely register in the weave unless you’re looking for them. Everything else around her is pure human consciousness. I’m afraid of just how much I like the way that light feels, like I want to reach out and bring it into me. It’s so bright. So alive. I reach out a hand towards her and pull it back quickly, earning me a confused stare. “Dr. Yu, did you need something?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Do you ever have hallucinations, Dr. Yu? As if you see something just outside of your vision?”

“The panic,” I answer too quickly. She flips to another page on the clipboard. “Sometimes. Sometimes I think I see a shadow move or an object just off the surface of a table instead of on it. Alex says it’s post traumatic stress.”

“Mr. Yu is very likely correct in that assessment. The same symptoms are across the board for other survivors of the Talos 1 breach.” I shut my eyes as she speaks and listen to the steady scratch of her pen against the papers. I see myself from across the table. It’s different than looking at the glass where I can see all of the threads around me, watch my thoughts spill out to fill the empty space. All she sees is Morgan Yu. Morgan who has forgotten to shave for who knows how long and who probably hasn’t touched a brush since he left quarantine. Everything is carefully crafted, intentional signs of negligence. They can’t see it through the coral, so I’ve had to improvise. When I open my eyes again she’s leaning forward, elbows on her knees, and staring at me. “Dr. Yu? You don’t have to answer at length. Just a yes or no.”

“I’m sorry.” I tuck my head and try to look apologetic. “What was the question?”

“I asked if you feel that your hallucinations are impacting your work.”

“No. No more than anything else. It’s just something I need to work though.” My voice slips. Alex’s words come out and, for a second, they’re in Alex’s voice. “We’ve all got a lot of adjusting to do, but I think once we start getting things back to something like normal it’ll start going a lot smoother.”

“Dr. Yu,” she pauses, sets the clipboard on her lap. “Morgan. Can you tell me about your relationship with your brother?”

“It’s great. We disagree sometimes on procedures for experiments, but I…” I touch one of the threads near me, feel the light move into my hand, and breathe in. It catches in my throat. I remind myself I don’t need air and can’t choke, which is less helpful than it should be. “I’d do anything for Alex. He’s the reason I’m here.”

Dr. Adesina isn’t satisfied by the answer, but she drops it. The light moves around her again. It pulses like coral that hasn’t fully manifested yet. If I focus on it long enough, I can almost taste it. I don’t know if she senses it or just wants to get back to the interview, but she clears her throat. “The rest of the questions are standard procedure, before you ask. Do you ever feel like you’re being watched? Maybe by the shadowy figures you said you’ve seen.”

“I am being watched.” She looks at me over her glasses and I hurry to explain myself. “Sokolov and Ayala. My minders while I’m still under observation. I’m out of quarantine, but the Typhon mods are still a potential liability.”

“Does that ever bother you? It sounds like quite the invasion of privacy.”

“It’s a necessity. There’s always personality drift when neuromods are installed or uninstalled. Sometimes it can be volatile.” Alex calls this my ‘company presentation’ voice. It’s supposed to sound confident and soothing. It’s the voice Morgan had in a lot of his research recordings with Bellamy, but never the ones by himself. I don’t like the way it moves, spirals of cracked light, or how it tastes like the food Alex says is inedible, like cans. It does what it’s supposed to, though. “The observation does limit the scope of what I do in my free time, though not so much as to be a problem. A few more doctor’s appointments and there should be enough data to gauge the type and severity of personality drift, and whether or not it’s going to be an issue.”

“What do you think about the personality drift you’ve mentioned? Does it ever feel like you’re another person? Or maybe like you’re experiencing the world like watching a movie?”

“No.” She can’t see the way a lie moves the threads differently than truth. Your mind has to work harder to lie. The truth is part of your consciousness. It floats around your being. A lie distorts the weave just enough to notice that is isn’t naturally occurring. I’m glad no one else sees things the way I do. I’m getting too good at lying and it’s becoming too necessary. “I feel more like myself than ever.”

“How do you mean, Dr. Yu?”

“I feel like I have a renewed purpose. I can finally get back to work outside of quarantine, be part of the crew again. I’ve been able to patch things up with Alex and resolve some old issues with the survivors from Talos 1.”

“That’s wonderful.” There’s a second of hesitation as she shifts another paper on the board. “You said that you were eager to work with the rest of the crew again. But the information your brother gave me says that you’ve been avoiding some of your routine obligations around the station. Is that due to research or is there another cause?”

“What sort of obligations?”

“You’ve been staying as far away from the mimetics labs as possible. I know Ms. Ilyushin works there. Would that have something to do with it?”

“How do you know about her?”

“It’s in your old files, Dr. Yu. You talked about her frequently to your previous psychologist.”

“I’m sorry.” I offer her the most sincere apology I can and replicate the expression Igwe said was ‘shame’. Something in me twists. I feel the threads pulling at me from all angles and I hear Mikhaila’s voice just above the humming. “It’s a sore subject, doctor. We’ve had some difficulties.”

“Are there any you’d feel comfortable talking to me about?”

“No,” I answer. Too quick. The word escapes as soon as the thought is formed and my throat snaps shut once it leaves. I don’t need air. I never have. But I feel like I’m choking. She makes a note on the clipboard and nods. The tension melts from the threads around her. Everything flows naturally. I thought the heightened emotions were wrong, but maybe it depends on context. Igwe said that heartbreak and longing were some of the most quintessential parts of the human experience. I guess Dr. Adesina agrees. 

“How do you feel about Typhon Dr. Yu?”

My skin ripples. Something in my core turns over. The tension returns and try to shut off my senses, blind myself to the threads. She puts a hand on my forearm carefully. I want to tell her not to. Contamination. I pull away too quickly and she presses her lips together.

“It's a natural reaction to be afraid of them after what happened on Talos 1. I'm not judging you.” She stops and tilts her head. “Do you not like physical contact doctor?”

“I was in quarantine for a while. I don't think you're supposed to touch me.”

“The suits are fully environmentally sealed. I don't think there's any risk of passing on contaminants.”

“It's Typhon. It doesn't follow the rules of Terran biology.”

“Your illness was Typhon based?” She sets the clipboard down. Her eyes focus on me and I wonder if she can see the threads warp near me. She can’t. There’s no neuromod made that could make her. But there’s a split second where I’m afraid.

“No.” I move in my chair. My hands drum out a familiar rhythm. My chest hurts. It feels like it's contracting in preparation to change forms. Then I laugh. “No. Not an illness. Me. I'm Typhon based.”

“Dr. Yu.” Her brows draw together and her teeth grind against the inside of her cheek. The light around her hums. Loud and bright and beautiful. “Your neuromods are Typhon based, but that doesn't make you a Typhon any more than it makes me one.” 

“You have mods, Dr. Adesina?” I know she does. I can feel them in the air around us. If I concentrate, I can name them. I could tell you when they were installed. I want to change topics, though. Anything but me. Anything but the Typhon I keep seeing. Anything but Mikhaila.

“A few.”

“What kinds?” She hesitates and I smile. There’s the right amount of teeth in my mouth this time, the right amount of reflected light I stole from her. It puts her at ease enough to tell me about the neuromods. I relax into the hum. Neuroscience is familiar, safe. It makes me feel like Morgan. It makes me feel like me. I want to be me right now. I don’t want to think about Typhon. I don’t want to think about Alex and Mikhaila and Cobalt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for how delayed this chapter was! Things have been a little crazy between moving and school, but I hope that I can get back to a reasonable update schedule soon.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos and to all of the loyal readers who continue to be patient with me. (And to Wayward_Chronicler as always for making sure I sound like a human. The editing work is greatly appreciated.)


	10. Can's Eye View

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mim continues to put off his doctor’s appointment by going to work with Sho and getting an almost tour of Talos 2. This turns out to be a poor idea.

I have a 2 PM appointment with Dr. Park. Alex set up my schedule so that I’d be able to go from Dr. Adesina to the cafeteria for lunch and then to my physical. He was adamant about lunch. Monitoring my digestion and how it functions was one of the main reasons for the appointment. 

It’s 4 PM. I haven’t eaten and I haven’t been to see Dr. Park. 

When Sho finds me I’m a can of Kafe Karsk and don’t have any pressing desire not to be one. She sits down and mimes opening the can. When I don’t respond, she sets me down on her knee. I keep still. She knows, somehow, that it’s me. I should be afraid. She shouldn’t know. The entire point of mimicry is to blend in, to be unseen, and to just not exist for a while. I should be afraid, and I’m not.

“You’re doing a really bad job of hiding,” she says, passing the can—me—between hands. “Alex scheduled another meeting? Oh, don’t tell me, Mikhaila wants to go out on a date? Igwe wants you to listen to his new slow jazz saxophone recital?”

I can’t laugh and be a can at the same time, which is a shame. I don’t even realize when I change. One minute I’m just Kafe Karsk and the next Morgan is laying on the floor laughing hysterically. Sho looks proud of herself.

“He has a saxophone?”

“No.” She grins and the light spirals out from around her. “I just went with the most ridiculous thing I could think of.”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Most cans don’t hover half an inch off the tile.” Her grin doesn’t help. I keep laughing. Alex is going to hear me. He’s going to find me. I try to make myself stop. I don’t want him to know that I’m shirking my duties, that I’m hiding. I don’t want him to know that I’m afraid. I try to remind myself how to breathe. It’s just a matter of expelling air differently. It shouldn’t be hard.

“Hey, Mim, you okay?” She reaches out to grab my shoulder and stops short, watching the black wisps trail away from me. Her smile is gone. “You might want to work on the emotions thing. You’re getting Typhony again.” 

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s just…” A look away. A frown. She licks her lips and sighs. “It’s what you are. But I still get kind of shaken up by the living smoke monster thing, you know?”

“Yeah. So do I.” I’m bad at breathing. I laugh, but it’s shaky and shrill. “That’s kind of dumb, isn’t it? A mimic that’s scared of Typhon.”

“Not really,” she says and shrugs.

I sit back against the wall next to her, listening to the voices in the cafeteria and watching words scroll across my arm. The ingredient list for the can of Kafe Karsk. I shut my eyes and think of the Looking Glass recordings, of Morgan. I haven’t watched any of his videos today. I haven’t turned the sim on in a lot longer. I regret it. It should be getting easier to stay myself, not harder.

“So, want to tell me why you were hiding as a can near the cafeteria trash bin? Someone could’ve tossed you in the recycling.”

“I had an appointment. Dr. Park. In the mimetics lab. I didn’t want to go.” I run my thumb along the tips of my fingers, watching until they’re smooth and black like Sho’s gloves. “I heard her voice on the Transcribe. She left me a reminder about the appointment. I don’t know. Something about it was all wrong. It must have triggered some sort of flight or fight response. So, I just turned into a can. I guess I forgot people are here and recycle cans…”

“You want to come to work with me?”

“What?”

“Hang out with me, as a can or otherwise. If you’re going to ditch an appointment, you should probably hide somewhere you won’t get thrown away.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed.”

“Mim, when was the last time you were somewhere besides your room, Alex’s office, or the cafeteria?”

“I went to visit Igwe the other day when he was playing piano in the rec room. Though, I probably shouldn’t have. I’m not even sure I should be in the cafeteria as much as I am until I’m confirmed to be stable.”

“See, this is what I mean. Just once, fuck it. Fuck the travel restrictions and fuck Alex. If you were going to go crazy and eat someone, you would have by now.” There’s a pause. The threads pull tight around her and I see a flicker or something in that vast blackness that shields her thoughts. A Typhon. Talos 1. But it isn’t Talos 1, not the way I remember it. She sighs and it’s gone. “Look, Mim, seriously, keeping you cooped up like some kind of animal in a zoo is not how you socialize a new person. If you’re supposed to save humanity, you need to at least meet a few of us.”

“I have.”

“I mean outside of Alex’s chosen control group.”

“This still sounds like a really bad idea.” I’m remembering the clock, the way I keep losing myself around Mikhaila. I look at my skin and it’s perfect, back to normal, even the name tag is firmly in place. I run a hand over my jaw and feel the start of a beard. I think I’m in control. Maybe. That still leaves the rules for containment, though. “Alex knows I haven’t gone to see Dr. Park by now. I probably have a lot of missed calls from him wondering where I am. I’m supposed to check in.”

“How much do you think Alex keeps from you?” The silence says it all. She nods. “You can have a few secrets of your own. Besides, no one would question me carrying a can of coffee around on the job.”

“Why?”

“I have a morning, night rotation. I’m supposed to be off duty, but here I am because someone has a hangover.”

“I meant why would you take me to work with you? Aren’t you worried about Alex?”

“Yeah, but not in a job security way. I’m worried he’s going to get us all killed. Again.” She stands up and stretches, conspicuously not looking at me. “For humans, the quickest way to make someone hate you is to lie to them. Big lies, not the little white lies like ‘that’s not a dumb idea for an adventurer’. Personally, I’m amazed the whole sim thing didn’t do it. But it didn’t. And I’d prefer you didn’t decide you were fed up when whatever truth Alex is hiding finally comes out. Also, you gave me Abby’s old Fatal Fortress recordings. So, I owe you.”

“You needed them.”

“Yeah, I did. I really did.” She sighs and checks the time on her TranScribe. “I gotta get going. If you want to come, now’s the time.”

“Alright.” I focus on the empty coffee can Sho set down and spread myself out through the threads around it. In a second, I’m cool and weightless. And then I’m being shoved into a toolbelt with a set of chewed on pens and transcribe. When Sho starts speaking, I can’t understand her. I have to focus to remember words. You don’t really need a lot of vocabulary as a coffee can, usually. She keeps talking as we go. I’m not sure when her voice becomes clear again, but she’s giving me a debriefing about what to expect. I really wish I’d heard most it. I know the layout of the station by heart. I went over the plans to make sure I could figure out where to go if I got lost or someone carried me into another sector when I was a mug. The floor plan is identical to Talos 1, though with less private cafes and pubs, and more containment chambers and security training rooms.

The hallways are nothing special. White tile. White walls. Bright lights. It doesn’t look like the sim. The luxurious wood and gold and décor is gone, replaced by a sterile environment that looks like a lab. It’s awful, but I guess it’s harder for a mimic to hide. There are remnants of beauty, though, in spite of what look like vigorous attempts to remove it. There are windows everywhere leading to the outside. There are many, many more plants than there were in the sim, and a wider variety. I don’t know what they’re called and, if I had to guess, Sho doesn’t either. She makes sure to bring the toolbox close to them, though. They’re the only real décor. Talos 1 was warm and inviting, luxurious—and a little ostentatious, if we’re being honest. Talos 2 is a military research facility. 

She stops talking as we walk into Data Storage. The electricity everywhere moves through me and it takes a concentrated act of will to remain a can. The tape drives and the computer fans are deafening. I could stay here forever, soaking in the energy. And then we’re moving. Someone is instructing Sho to walk through a scanner in a monotone that makes me think, at first, that the security guard is an operator.

An alarm sounds. The guard swears.

“Typhon material detected.” The scanner is going off. I stay still. My body starts to move, to shift away to the other side of the room, but I know it’ll just attract more attention if I do. I am a can. That’s all. I just have to stay a can until they hopefully decide it’s a malfunction.

Sho drops her toolbelt and empties her pockets. The guards are going through everything. I concentrate on the sound of the tape drives as a guard picks me up and sets me on a conveyor belt. This must be why Alex doesn’t let me wander. I try to remember all the times we walked around the station together. He always called ahead. He always stayed close. There were so many security measures in place and I violated every single one of them just by existing. 

“Found it!” One of the other security officers triumphantly holds up a tool box with fabricator cubes in it. On the very top are two shining purple blocks of ‘exotic material’. Sho doesn’t relax. They run the box through the scanner and get the same ‘Typhon material detected’ alert, which seems to be enough.

“How many times have we had the ‘no equipment leaves the work area’ conversation?”

“Too many,” Sho sighs as she hurriedly loads everything back into the tool bag and her pockets. This time she slips me into the suit next to her TranScribe. I can still feel her thoughts racing. Her heart is thrumming louder than all the tape drives in the data storage. Then there’s silence. She’s fastening her toolbelt back on mechanically. “I had a rough week, Officer Turnbull. It won’t happen again.”

“You said that last week,” the other guard snaps. “And the week before.”

I hear shuffling and the senior guard clear her throat. “It’s alright. Maybe find a work buddy to remind you to leave your things in your locker. You could give a lot of people a heart attack by carrying that around.”

The guard is thinking about all the reasons that Sho isn’t being reassigned, that these things keep happening, and I feel hypocritical for agreeing that maybe she should talk to the resident psychologist. Her thoughts are empty, though. She turns into an inanimate object when panic sets in, the same way I do. She clears her mind completely and runs on a practiced script. It isn’t until we’re past Security Checkpoint 2 that I feel the threads around her become active again. In the din of the inventory storage center, she finally starts speaking.

“I’m going to have to put you in my tool box. I forgot all the security stations here are programmed to pick up any sign of Typhon.” She opens the box and sets me down in it, then frowns. I don’t fit. And, even if I did, it looks strange. I shift again, this time into a luminous purple cube. I’d laugh if I could. Sho laughs for me. “That’ll work. I promise to keep the lid open when I’m working, okay? That way you can get a look around.”

She waits a minute before shutting the lid. I don’t need it open, but she doesn’t know that. I see everything as we move, sometimes through her eyes and sometimes through those of whoever is nearby. They don’t notice a passenger behind their eyes, stretched out along the weave just outside of their consciousness. I let myself drift and hope she doesn’t open the box without warning. I’m not sure what she’d find, but it wouldn’t be an exotic material cube.

In the main lobby, as Sho makes her way to the first stop on her list, she stops in front of the wall of glass and sets the toolbox down. I reassemble into something nearby before she opens the lid. I think I’m a pencil. She turns the box around to face the outside and breathes deeply. A low hum escapes her. When I see what she was looking at, I’m amazed she could make a sound at all. The sun is rising over Earth. The coral enveloping it catches its rays and radiates them back out. Hundreds of millions of consciousnesses, the thoughts of innumerable dead galaxies, have been woven together into a blanket of spun gold around Earth. Something inside me aches. How can you be homesick for a planet you’ve never visited? Or is it the Coral I’m homesick for? It doesn’t matter, not now. Not from so far above it all. Sho sits down next to the toolbox and watches the stars. She names the constellations aloud. She can tell me where we are in relation to the L2 point just by how far away they are. Forgotten Soviet satellites move by, still sending out transmissions to no one. 

After a few minutes, her TranScribe beeps and she shuts the lid. We move on. The first stop is a storage room for lab equipment, were Sho takes numbers and makes notes of what they need or have a surplus of. The people in lab uniforms are a little unsettling. I don’t know them, but I feel like I do. I’ve never met anyone here before to recognize them. We go down one of the grav shafts into another lab area, this one for some sort of ballistics. She sets the toolbox down on at table, opens it, and pulls out a few cubes along with a set of fabrication plans. They discuss the strange looking lathe in question at length before he asks Sho to do something with the nearby reployer and she makes a hasty excuse to leave. I don’t know how she survives doing this all day. I’d rather be doing neuromod calculations, complete with the indeterminate derivatives that Morgan was hung up on, than counting syringes.  
I drop in and out of observer mode. Her job isn’t exactly thrilled and it’s not like I’m getting to socialize. I listen to her make small talk with coworkers or tell me about the areas were in, but my attention is elsewhere. I keep remembering the Coral covered earth. I can still see it in eerie half memories. Weavers dance between crumbling trees, spinning the remains of their rudimentary consciousnesses into new Coral. Typhon-like animals roam the landscape, frantically searching for food and clawing at the doors of the few human settlements left. I wonder who here was from earth. Whose memories am I absorbing? 

“You might want to turn into something that isn’t a fabricator cube,” Sho says. I fade back into myself and realize I don’t know how long I’ve been in here. “We’re making one last stop my shift is over. I think you’ll like it.”

The latch clicks. I scramble to remember how to form a cube. The light barely comes in before the box goes tumbling and crashes into a tree. I land in the grass and an assortment of electronics fall on me. 

“Mim!” Sho’s holding a wrench, shaking. I stumble to my feet. Feet? Cans don’t have feet. Fine. I’m not a can. I’m Morgan. I shouldn’t be Morgan, but that’s the first shape I could manage. And not very well, if Sho’s expression is any indication. 

How many times have I shifted today? Three. So far. Four if you count the morning routine. I’m worn thin. I’d give my TranScribe for my thermos with the psychotropic particle filter about now. As much as I hate to say it, Alex is right. I shouldn’t go out. I’m not ready. This is why I have a doctor’s appointment. I can be Morgan all day, it’s in my DNA, but shifting too many times means I need a hypo. Or the water.

“Mim, what the hell?”

“I’m sorry.” My hand ripples. Light crackles between my fingers. Smoke spirals away from me, bits of a body that isn’t mine trying to escape. “I can’t hold form.”

“I thought Morgan was just your natural shape.”

“It is! It is…” My hand solidifies and I flex my fingers. The echo leaves my voice. “I just don’t feel so great. That’s all.”

“What kind of ‘not great’?” Sho lowers the wrench a little, but doesn’t put it away. She knows. Just like Mikhaila did. Just like Alex does. I don’t answer. Igwe called this feeling ‘tired’, but that isn’t right. I’m stretched out too thin. There isn’t enough of me. The hypos don’t put enough back and being Morgan, even if that is my default state, takes too much out. I think this is what humans call ‘hungry’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long. Wayward_Chronicler has been helpful as ever, but transcendental calculus is eating all of my free time. (Because apparently you can't go to space without calculus. Who knew.) I will try to get a more stable update schedule, but for now they will probably continue to have a long time between them. I'm attempting to keep the quality stable,at least. Though I'm probably going to come back and edit this chapter again...
> 
> I apologize for the cliffhanger ending! Mostly.


	11. Typhon Voices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim discovers that his connection to the coral isn't as severed as he thought it was, realizes his fate hinges on the doctor he's been actively avoiding, and tries to eat delicate electronics like every other three week old normally does.

I barely made it to the employee bathroom. Sho didn’t even try to follow me. I don’t blame her. I saw myself in the mirror and…

I don’t know what I saw. Definitely not Morgan Yu.

I was afraid. Afraid of my own reflection. And, worse, I was afraid of what that thing wanted to do in the arboretum. I felt myself pulling the threads around Sho towards me, into me, and I ran. Locked myself in. Three people have knocked and tried the handle before deciding it was closed for maintenance. I’m not sure how long it’s been. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe an hour. I finally work up the energy to check my TranScribe when Alex calls. I hit ‘answer’ instinctively and regret it.

“Morgan? Where are you? No one I’ve talked to has seen you all afternoon.”

“I’m sick.” My voice is too loud. It bounces off the walls and carries. The threads sing around me. They scream. The noise I’m making isn’t human but Alex hears the distress. 

“Morgan, what’s going on?”

“My shape isn’t a shape. I’m space. I can’t be Morgan.”

He swears in a language I don’t recognize, harsh and guttural. With it comes flashes of a father I’ve never met. They’re not particularly pleasant. 

“Where are you right now?”

“In the bathroom. Near the Arboretum.”

“The Arboretum? How did you get all the way up there?” He inhales heavily and holds it before exhaling. When he speaks again, his voices sounds like it did in the SIM. I realize I’ve made a mistake, a big one. “Alright. You’re not too far off from Lab 8-B. I can get someone from Mimetics to meet you there. It’s just down the hallway and to the right, past the vending machines. Do you think you can make it?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he says, resigned. I hear tapping on a keyboard in the background. “I can send someone to you with a hypo. That might help you get back together. Can you sit tight until then?”

Words suddenly escape. I make a sound that almost sounds like a ‘yes’.

“Alright. I’ll call ahead so Park is expecting you.”

I’m laughing. Sort of. Maybe crying. Park. My only hope now is Dr. Park. I’d almost rather stay here. I swear I can see her face. It’s distorted by glass so thick that even thoughts can’t pass through it. She barely looks human. The Looking Glass recording of Morgan is playing, the image is transparent enough I almost make out her features. There’s a vacuum emptier than space. No coral to tether you against your lack of internal gravity. And then the pain. I scream.

“Morgan?” Alex sounds close. His voice shakes with human static. “Morgan, what happened?”

I try to answer and nothing comes out. I forgot how alien speech is. Typhon don’t speak. They don’t need to. For a second I’m angry that I even have to. I feel the Coral being excised from my being, thread by thread, until there’s nothing left but framework for a new Morgan. I see Park.

“Morgan. If you can hear me, say something.”

“I’m here, Alex.” The voice isn’t mine. I don’t feel it move in me. It’s a distant chorus of voices that aren’t quite Morgan. Alex hesitates too long before he speaks. 

“Alright. Good. I’m going to call the doctor. Just sit tight until someone comes for you. I can stay on the line if you need me to.”

“Alright,” I echo. The transcribe crackles. Alex is gone. I hit the call button until it sticks in place, but to no avail. Sparks dance between my fingers. I feel the stolen electricity move within me and the hunger ebbs just a little. There’s too much going on. I see the voices that used my mouth, that talked to Alex with my voice. Ink splotches edged in gold. The room is closing in on me. It’s too bright. Too loud.

_‘Don’t let them do this to you.’_

I’m not me. Not right now. I’m something else, formless thought. The heartbeat of Talos 2 pulses around me. Thoughts arc around the crew, electrical signals all lost in the greater consciousness. Someone’s singing. Someone sent an email about a date. Someone had their stash of bourbon raided. Each bit of light explodes in my vision and seamlessly melds into the weave. They ripple ever out. Ever out into the blackness between stars.

_‘You know what you have to do. Don’t you?’_

I reach out and grasp one of the threads, a miscommunication about medical inventory and a tersely worded memo. It solidifies in my hand. Alex called it angelic. Morgan thought so too. I’d probably use another word. Wisps of black move across my skin and bend towards the sliver of Coral. I imagine pulling it close, spinning it around my fingers. I could eat it like an udon noodle, couldn’t I? There are so many threads, though. Even now it’s connected to a million other things. I could pull it away, snap the connections, but I don’t know what would happen.

_‘This is what you are. What do you think you’re accomplishing by ignoring it?’_

This time it isn’t in my head. The voice echoes in the bathroom. A chorus of Morgan’s voice, distant and judgmental. I feel the phantom pain again, the emptiness where ‘we’ became ‘I’.

_‘Who are you, Morgan? Do you even know?’_

“Shut up!” The lights flicker in time with my voice. Static bursts through me like a pulse. I hold a hand up and look at it, watch it morph between tendrils and fingers. The threads around me shift. Their glow is brighter than anything I’ve seen. They hum endlessly, each ripple of sound pulling me out of the stall I’m in. 

And then I’m in front of the mirror. Everything leads back to mirrors, back to glass. But this time there’s no Sokolov or Ayala on the other side. No observers. Just me. There’s a phantom in the glass and even without the voice I know that it isn’t me. I take a breath and squeeze my eyes shut. I think about Morgan, the way he moved, the way he sounded, and the way his eye was always just a little red. I let him fade away. Just once. I focus on the void left behind in his wake. The darkness between the stars. It moves. Coalesces into form.

“Well, Mim, what are you?”

I open my eyes. Six. White. Crackling with electricity. Just how I remember them. But buried in blackness that stretches past the mirror. Blackness that threatens to consume everything in the room. It wraps around the light bulbs and sucks away their energy. I feel endless. I feel the walls against my skin, or what I guess would pass for skin. And I feel the weave around me, inside me.

“Good evening, Dr. Yu!” The door slams open and I crash back into a human shape. The operator keeps chattering, unfazed. A hatch on its chassis opens so it can scan me. “My, but you’ve clearly been busy since the last time I saw you. Psionic potential is reading as….curious. It’s saying full and empty at the same time. Well, not to worry. Dr. Park loaded me up with a full supply just in case.”

“Who are you?” My voice still resounds with static. I reach out and a wisp of smoke curls around the operator.

“I’m Thaddeus IV. One of the designated science operators of Mimetics Lab 2-C. I’m surprised you don’t remember me, Dr. Yu. You were in my ward for months before you were released from containment.” It bobs closer to me and dispenses a psi hypo. A thread of black moves up the cannula into the barrel of the syringe. It pulls the liquid into it instantly and Thaddeus IV dispenses another one. “If I may be so bold, Dr. Yu, you don’t seem to be yourself today. I haven’t seen you in this shape since they brought you off that Terran shuttle.”

“The what?” 

Thaddeus tells me what ‘Terra’ is. He talks about seasons and trees, about everything but the shuttle he mentioned. A programming constraint? Or maybe a gag order. I decide against trying to push for information. Talking is too hard. My head is too loud for words. The second hypo calms the noise. The lights dim and the weave goes out of focus. I expect the voice to go away, but it stabilizes. It sounds closer now.

_‘You know what you have to do.’_

I do.

The shadows close in. Wisps of black move across the operator. A capacitor pops as it dispenses a third hypo. The audio output is too distorted to make sense, but it might be a distress signal. The emergency boosters activate briefly before it clangs to the ground. Around it, the threads solidify. A hatch on the operator opens halfway as the LEDs go dark. The threads, glowing and beautiful, encircle me. That black hole at the center of my being pulls them in.

“Good evening, Dr. Yu,” I hear my voice say in a mechanized tone. I see numbers behind my eyes, lines of code that shouldn’t make sense but do. My body is weightless. The floor is a few feet below me. I spread out across the severed threads until they’re all absorbed. When my feet touch the ground, I’m Morgan Yu again. The operator sits on the floor, completely dark save for a single red light indicating an internal error. I take the last hypo it dispensed and sit down to inject it. There’s no whir of circuitry from the operator. No beeping. Just the slow blink of the LED. 

“I’m sorry, Thaddeus.”

My skin turns back into a TranStar uniform. I expect it to look alien, like it isn’t mine, but it doesn’t. Still Morgan. Still me. I pick up the operator and cradle it as I head to Dr. Park’s office.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reasons why Wayward Chronicler has to be in on the editing process: I nearly titled this "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who's the Fairest Typhon of All." The answer, of course, is Mim.
> 
> I'd like to apologize for the spotty update schedule. Engineering is not a forgiving major. Hopefully the updates are worth the wait!


	12. The Good Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim finally gets some answers, but they may not be the ones he wants.

The TranScribe still isn’t working, so I follow the signs to the Mimetics lab. I know the way by heart now. I’ve been here so many times in the SIM that it’s almost muscle memory. But all Talos 2 has in common with Talos 1 is the floor plan. It’s so strange. So sterile. Without Alex at my side, it’s frightening. 

My only consolation is that with so many workers in the area the threads are everywhere. They send out ripples of forgotten thoughts and hum loud enough to drown my unease. Most of the employees ignore me. They’re too focused on their TranScribes or in too much of a hurry to get to their assignment. I’m grateful. I don’t know how much I actually pass for Morgan right now. 

The closer I get to the lab, the more times I hear a tense ‘Good evening. Dr. Yu’. I don’t speak. I don’t trust myself to. I know that my smile wouldn’t be a smile. A nod seems more than enough. A few people seem shocked by even that. I wonder what the Dr. Yu they remember was like. Was it the real Morgan? How many iterations of Dr. Yu have the Talos crew met without realizing what they were? 

I stop outside the psychotronics lab and slump against the wall. Everything in me is screaming not to go in there. My skin feels too tight. The name on my badge is gone. My thoughts are flooded with old nightmares about the labs, about Dr. Park and the glass. Even the voices in the coral warned me about it. In the bathroom, when everything else was out of place, outside of my consciousness, the glass was still there. I know it’s some fragment of whatever I used to be, but I can't be sure. Whenever I try to remember anything before I was Morgan, my mind shudders and recoils. I've stopped trying to remember, but the nightmares continue. 

I hug Thaddeus closer and brace myself as I pull open the door. 

The office is nothing like my dreams. The walls are clean and white, decorated with neo-deco posters showing how much water you should drink per day and something called a ‘food pyramid’. The tools on the nearby table are wrapped, vacuum sealed, and less threatening than most of the eating utensils in the cafeteria. No glass. No containment chambers. Yet the gravity at my center remains.

I sit down on the paper lined cot in the middle of the room and wait. Lungs form as I read the instructions about breathing exercises to do before a physical exam. I make the heart I don’t need beat and it syncs to my breathing before I can stop it. I can feel the assistants watching me though the two way mirrors. If I focus, I can hear their pens scratching away. Just like Sokolov and Ayala. Just like normal. The nametag reforms on my suit. The small details take shape again. I don’t hear the footsteps or the click of the latch, but I feel the room get heavier.

“Dr. Yu,” a voice that shouldn’t be familiar greets me. Dr. Park enters the office on Alex’s heels and with them comes the feeling of claustrophobia. I want to be anywhere else. Anything else. But I already know that if I tried to shift into a mug now I wouldn’t be able to. I’ve read Morgan’s reports since the last time I was in Alex’s office, particularly the parts about the ‘localized psychotropic stabilization field’. It was meant to prevent mimicry and mimic reproduction. The field notes said the research went hand in hand with Project Cobalt. I guess I know why now. The doctor is patiently watching me, lips tight and eyes narrowed into black slits behind her glasses. She looks at me the way Sho looks at cafeteria chopsticks.

“Morgan?” Alex’s voice is soft. He sounds like Igwe. But the space around him is empty. Sealed off. He takes a step forward and the weave stops humming. Everything is human colors and human sounds. The flatness startles me. My body lurches and contracts, but nothing happens. Alex sits down in the chair next to me and sets a hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad you were able to make it here safely. You had me worried back there.”

“What the hell did it do to my operator?” Her eyes move between me and Thaddeus. I tighten my grip on him.

“Bon-hwa, this isn’t really the time.”

“Yes. It is. That was the only operator in this sector qualified to work on Typhon based subjects. And it did what? Corrupted it? Killed it?”

“I…” My voice comes from somewhere outside of me. I can’t think in the forced silence. “I ate him. I’m sorry.”

Park’s eyes widen to fill her glasses and her nostrils flare. Then, she tips her head back and laughs. It’s worse than the old recycler in Sho’s sector, the one that you can hear stripping materials down to their core components. I wish I could cover my ears to block it out. 

“You have a technophage Typhon, Mr. Yu. Something never once considered by any of the experimental projections.” She adjusts her glasses before tapping something into her TranScribe. “Neither the electricity nor the rudimentary consciousness of an operator will offer much sustenance. It’s more like eating a protein bar than a full meal. I told you at the beginning of this project what we’d need to sustain your hybrid, but you refused to believe me. Do you understand now what sort of risks your taking by pretending it’s human?”

“Dr. Park,” Alex sighs. He turns away from her. His fingers curl on my shoulder, dig into what he’s only now realized isn’t fabric. “Morgan. I’m sorry. She’s attached to her operators. You did what you needed to do. Most importantly, you didn’t hurt anyone.”

“I almost hurt Sho.”

“I heard. She’s a little shaken up, but I think she’ll be okay.” He smiles when I nod. Park’s gone to her desk and is, occasionally, glancing over at Alex with disdain. After a moment, he reaches over to pat Thaddeus’ chassis. “You want to tell me what happened back there, Morgan? I have the reports, but I want to hear it in your own words.”

“I shifted too much. I couldn’t hold a shape anymore.” Alex watches me, silently. Park is fussing over something at her computer terminal. She looks over every so often, curls her upper lip, and continues typing. I think she’s waiting for me to let go of Thaddeus. When I don’t speak again, Alex pats my shoulder and tilts his head. His expression is inscrutable. His eyes settle on my hand, drumming out that familiar patter on the operator’s chassis. My mind scrambles to translate his expression. I can’t hear his thoughts. I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. I pull Thaddeus against me as the first sob escapes. “I didn’t know what to do. I felt so stretched, so empty. I needed something. Anything.”

“Hey, Morgan…” He pauses and kneels down by my chair. His hand moves from my shoulder to my back as he pulls me forward. I don’t let go of the operator. If he’s bothered by the sharp corners on Thaddeus, he doesn’t let on. “Hey, it’s going to be alright. You’re okay. Sho’s okay. We’re going to figure this out. Together.”

I try not to sink into the sudden physical contact, but he draws me closer. It’s disarming. I want to believe him. I want to have an older brother. But I hear the Coral. 

_**They’re lying to you.**_

_**Don’t let them do this.**_

“No.” My voice is the same as it was in the bathroom. The same as it was during those flashes in the SIM. Something just between Morgan and whatever I am. All I can think of is the thing in the mirror, endless and formless, like something out of a nightmare. My form starts to falter. I can feel the electricity in my eyes. I see the whole room at once.

“I thought you said you had a portable containment field in place!” Park is out of her chair in seconds, running towards a panel on the wall by her desk. A table full of instruments slides across the floor and slams into the wall, blocking her path.

“Morgan, get a hold of yourself.” He stumbles away from me, fumbling at something in a suit pocket. His face is twisted and scrunched into an expression I don’t recognize. His voice is barely audible. I move towards him and he stays still. After a moment, he holds his hand out to me. I reach for it before pulling back and wrapping my arms tighter around Thaddeus.

I know it now, that face. It’s the one Igwe makes when he plays his wife’s song on the piano. I’m on the other side of the room without taking a step. Park is climbing over the table. She’s by the controls now. Alex hasn’t moved. His expression hasn’t changed. His hand is still out, still waiting.

“What aren’t you telling me? You said this was Morgan’s idea. You said he came up with Cobalt. Why did he make a backup of himself? Why did he make something to stop it? Where’s April?!” 

“Morgan, calm down. You’re not stable right now.” He walks forward, palms up, something bright and violet in one hand. “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to let the Typhon take control.”

“There isn’t…” My fingers dig into Thaddeus’ chassis. I hear the sound of metal tearing. It feels good. Movement. Tension. Tearing. “There isn’t ‘the Typhon’ or me. There isn’t one or the other. It’s just me! That’s it!”

“Alright,” he sighs. “You’re right. But if it is just you, then that means you’ve got control of this.”

He swings his empty hand around the room so I can see the lights flickering. One of the medical operators lies sparking on the floor. A table hovers an inch off the ground.

“Is this what you want?”

“Tell me.” I lick my lips, or what should be lips, and shudder. Teeth, maybe. Tendrils of smoke and ink lined in teeth. Not a mouth. I shouldn’t even be able to talk. Phantom speech, I guess. “Tell me what I am.”

He says nothing. I hear footsteps around me. Heavy boots. Metal on metal. Someone called security. There’s a hum in the distance and I feel the psionic containment field charging. Alex holds a hand up to tell them to stand down.

“April.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Yes. It was.” Alex sets the device on a table and, empty handed, moves towards me. “You asked what you were. There’s your answer. You, Morgan, Mim, Cobalt, it all comes from Morgan’s connectome. April never got made. We used the imprint as part of the simulation projections as a ‘baseline’ personality for the hybrid being tested. You were the only one that didn’t fully assimilate it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who got an A this semester. This orc! Transcendental calculus is the work of the devil, which is why I signed up for the second part of it next semester. I make bad choices.
> 
> I'd like to thank everyone for all of the kind comments, words of encouragement, and patience with the sporadic updates. You're all wonderful. I don't think I would have gotten so far writing this fic without you. I hope the updates continue to be worth the wait. Even if new chapters take a while, I promise I won't be abandoning Replica. ( Wayward_Chronicler is under orders not to let me give up on it.)


	13. Choices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim realizes he was right about doctor’s visits, meets a familiar face, and kidnaps a nonfunctional operator.

“What?” I fight against the feeling of air escaping me, remind myself I’ve never really needed to breathe. The room is closing in. The containment field is stronger. I think Dr. Park flipped a switch somewhere. I struggle to collect my thoughts as two of the security personnel flank Alex. 

“Mr. Yu…” One of the security guards starts talking, but trails off as Alex walks towards me. Another one is relaying a report through his TranScribe. I think I hear the name ‘Elazar’. Alex takes a step closer and I take another step away. The security guards keep him from moving any farther. I want to scream, to tell them I’m not a threat, that the real threats are in the room and they don’t have any Typhon in them. I don’t. I can’t. I crumple to the floor with Thaddeus.

The room is tiny, limited only to the space between its walls. The only sounds are noises. Whatever Alex set down, one of the guards has picked up and turned on. The space around it is purple. The light it gives off is heavy. It falls to the floor and spreads out to fill the room. 

“Turn it off,” Alex barks. “Are you blind? It’s hurting him.”

“Mr. Yu, with all due respect, I don’t think we can risk the safety of this room for the comfort of a possible threat.”

“Kowalski is right.” I look up as soon as I hear her. I expect to see a military operator, not Sarah Elazar. She looks different than the SIM. Colorfully patterned ribbons are painted like patchwork across her chest. Her suit is bulkier than I remember, made to withstand the kind of damage that wasn’t a concern on Talos 1. Her face is all sharp angles, sharp eyes, and sharp scars. There is no softness to her. But it’s a different sharpness than Park or Mikhaila. It’s a needle instead of a knife and you hear it when she speaks. I know that if I could see, I’d see the weave wrap itself around her words. All the energy in the room moves towards her and everyone’s eyes go with it. 

“You signed on for this, didn’t you, Morgan? Save Talos. Save humanity. You chose that path the second you grabbed Alex’s hand in the SIM lab. Did you change your mind already?”

A sharp hum burrows behind my eyes and I finally look away from her face. There’s a disruptor in her hand, already fully charged. Even with the containment field up, I can taste the sparks coming off it. Part of me moves towards it, but the field pulls me back into myself. She looks me over, eyes settling on the spaces where my suit stops being a suit and the inky smoke drifts out.

“You fought a ship full of Typhon to save five people. And you’re about to destroy a lab, doom humanity worse than it is, for what?”

“They lied to me.” As soon as I said it, I felt the words still stuck in my mouth. Heavy. Cold. Like day old udon. Alex was lying. I’d known that from the beginning, hadn’t I? The first thing that greeted me when I left the SIM was the knowledge that everything I’d experienced, everything I thought I was, was an incredibly elaborate lie. Why did it only bother me now?

I watch my fingers melt together, split, and reform. My grip on Thaddeus slips. I catch him before he hits the floor. Elazar is silent. Her eyes stay focused. Her disruptor stays at ready.

“He lied.” My tongue darts across my teeth, counting how many I have and how sharp they are. My fingers drum against Thaddeus. Tap. Tap. Rap. Fingertips. Fingertips. Knuckles. For once, it isn’t soothing. “He said I was just a mimic. He said it would be enough. The hypos. The water. The pills. It wasn’t.”

She says nothing. She’s waiting. I look for the weave, but see nothing. No thoughts move near me. No signs that tell me what I should say. I can’t even hear Morgan’s voice anymore. The weight at my center shifts and I feel like I’d float away if I wasn’t holding Thaddeus.

“I found April. I saw what I was…” One of the guards’ hands twitches and I stop talking. Elazar clears her throat. The guard goes rigid. After a moment, she nods at me. 

The words won’t form, though. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I think I feel shame. Project Cobalt was the last hope for Talos 2. It was the salvation of the colonies, the possible salvation of earth, and I was its catalyst. But here I sat, surrounded by security for nearly eating Sho and lashing out at Alex. What changed between the SIM and now? Had anything really changed? I would have died ten times over in the SIM—I think I did—just to get a handful of people off of Talos. I tell myself it’s just exhaustion and hunger, that I would still make the same choices. I’ve questioned everything else about myself, but not that.

Elazar sees it even without the weave. There’s a different kind of hardness in her expression, now. It’s the same one I heard in her voice when she passed judgment on me after the SIM. She turns her attention to Alex and it’s gone.

“I know this is your project, Mr. Yu, but you need to keep him in his quarters or assign someone to him. Security Personnel. Operator. One of the two. We got lucky this time that none of the incidents were in a public sector. If someone had been in the bathroom or if there’d been a work group in the arboretum, we might not even be having this talk.”

“I’m aware, Chief Elazar,” he snaps. His eyes go to the little purple sphere in the guard’s hand and his hand balls. He tries to look at me, but he can’t. His gaze keeps drifting to Thaddeus, to his feet, or to anything else. 

“You’re the one who established the security protocols for Cobalt. You know how this could have ended.” He wants to speak, but she doesn’t let him. Her words cut through the room and sever any forming thoughts. “What if he didn’t make it to the lab in time and someone saw him? This entire project would have stopped right here.”

“If you two are done with your lover’s spat, there’s still the Typhon. We need to figure out what to do with it.” Dr. Park is back at her desk and trying to organize the scattered files. “Unless you have a spare crew member in the brig, we still don’t have a viable food source.”

“I’m not eating a person!” My voice is louder than I want it to be. A light near me flickers and dies. For a second, I see the weave juxtaposed against the fully formed Coral. I see the colors and threads around everyone, how tangled and knotted they are, and the central pulse that moves through all of them. They don’t know. They’re as lost as I am. Elazar is the first to speak.

“Then it’s settled. No repeating the mistakes of Talos 1. We lost too many humans to Typhon already; we’re in no position to start feeding crew members to one.”

“It’s not a choice.” Park slams her clipboard against the desk and everyone turns. I cover my ears against the sudden sound and the pressure it causes. “He does not have a choice, not any more than his pet Typhon does. It eats or it regresses. Has everyone here forgotten the string of ‘Morgans’ up to this point? It doesn’t matter if it thinks it’s Morgan Yu, mirror neurons and fake personalities don’t alter its physiology.”

I’m looking at the floor. I can’t look at them. We all knew it. We should have. The thinness that spread through me. The way my body has been pulled along the threads of the weave, pulled apart with nothing to bring it back together except the memory of Morgan. The Udon that swam through my body and never settled. It all should have told me enough. There is silence heavier than the containment field. I can feel my body stretching itself back into shape. I feel Park’s eyes.

“What do I do, then?”

They turn to look at me. Alex lifts his hand. His lips part. Nothing comes out. Dr. Park sits forward in her chair and straightens her back. She clears her throat and, only once everyone is facing her, she speaks.

“You eat. As Typhon do. There is no shortage of violent criminals on Earth. It’s madness down there. The hard part is going to be convincing people to send them here.”

“It’s out of the question.” I’ve never heard Alex’s voice so quiet. His eyes are staring at something outside of Park, maybe outside of Talos. “We’ll find a substitute.”

“And what will you do until then? Pump it full of psi hypo and pray it doesn’t eat its minders?”

“I think we can find a few spare science operators to feed him,” Elazar says coolly. Park’s face twists and she’s out of her chair in a second. 

“We’ll find something,” Alex says, placing himself between them. “That’s what this ‘check-up’ was for, wasn’t it, Dr. Park? To evaluate his nutritional needs?”

“That was before he decided to eat my operator.”

“Non-customized ones are easy enough to fabricate. We can run some tests with those. Try more potent psi-hypos. This is the farthest we’ve ever gotten. We knew we’d run into some snags. All it means is that we need to keep working.” He stops and looks at me, his expression faltering. “I’m sorry, Morgan. This means you’re quarantined to the labs again.”

“I understand.” The words come out of me this time, even though my mouth is numb. They taste like transmission static. I try to choke them out. Alex’s hand is on my shoulder again. I shut my eyes so I don’t have to look at him, so he won’t see the glass in my vision. 

“I really am sorry about this. The quarantine. April. Everything.” His fingers dig into my suit and I nod. Static spreads through me. The edges of my vision are alight with gold. I feel it fighting to be seen. I open my eyes to look at Alex and pray it goes away. He smiles at me. “Once you’re stabilized, I’ll come down here and answer all your questions about Cobalt. I’ll even bring some cans of coffee and your favorite mug, that one with the broken handle. How’s that sound?”

I nod again and he pats my shoulder. One of the security guards moves Alex towards the door while a medical operator begins scanning me. I hold my breath and think about what Elazar said. It feels like a lifetime ago that I took Alex’s hand. I can’t lie and say that I didn’t know what to expect. It’s just that what I expected was wrong, based on a reality that wasn’t mine.

I expected to be Morgan.

I expected to be human.

I think some part of me expected to be a hero.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you to everyone who reads! And a special thank you to Wayward_Chronicler for editing.
> 
> I know these last couple chapters have been confusing and I've been struggling with wanting to clarify in author's notes or letting the story play out organically. Hopefully everyone is willing to stick around for the ride while Mim finds out what the deal is with April and what he was/is. 
> 
> Alternate titles: "Typhon, Interrupted", "The Reluctant Cannibal"


	14. News

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim talks to himself, gets diet advice, eavesdrops on office gossip, and questions the existence of milk.

“Good morning, Morgan.” The alarm clock goes off as usual. I pull the covers over my head and hide from the fluorescent lights. “Today is January 20th, 2041. You have an appointment with Dr. Khoza at 9 AM.”

It’s never an appointment with Alex. When I got here, the mug was already on the kitchen counter with a single, short note from him: “I’m sorry, Morgan.” He never came. Never left a message. I don’t know if I’m supposed to figure things out myself, if he doesn’t trust me after my breakdown, or if he’s just that busy. It’s only been a couple days. It’s not like I’ve been abandoned for weeks on end. 

_He’s afraid of you._

The gold slips into my vision. More and more, the voice doesn’t sound like Morgan Yu. It’s familiar, but I can’t place it. I think I’ve heard it before in the dreams about Earth. Maybe that’s just what the Coral sounds like, an amalgam of half remembered voices. I swat at the gold threads, trying to tear them down. Trying to get the voice that shouldn’t be familiar to shut up. Maybe that’s why Alex won’t come, won’t tell me. Maybe he knows how loud it is in my head. Maybe he doesn’t want his words to spool out across the threads and find their way to the core of whatever creature weaves them. 

_They know what you are._

I put a pillow over my face to drown it out. It won’t work. It never does. You need human ears for that, a single method of hearing. I can feel the voice vibrate across the threads within me, moving through the smoke and ink to that central weight that binds it all together. 

_They know what you can do._

The alarm clock keeps going. It skips from the electronic pop Sho gave me to something by Leitner. 

_Why do you think they hide it?_

“Security,” I grumble as I sit up. I’m Morgan in more ways than I thought. What I was, what I started as, was a direct copy of his connectome. His mind. His goals. His obsession. His madness. All of it was somewhere in me. The only difference is that if I ever wanted to destroy Talos like he did, I could probably do it. Without the arming keys. I don’t know what I am for sure, but I can guess. Whatever else they put inside me, the base was still clear. 

I shake off the memory of the too small bathroom and force myself into the morning routine. There’s breakfast in the rice cooker. The coffee maker burbles a final time and turns off. Right on time. As always. I touch both appliances to make sure they’re real before sitting down at the bar stool. My hand lingers on the mug with the missing handle. I broke it the first time I mimicked it. I lost my balance and rolled off the desk. It fell with me. The handle shattered. Alex’s name in all its golden glory was impossible to piece back together. I was afraid that was the end of the project for me, but he just laughed it off. He was going to throw the mug in the recycler until I asked if I could have it. I don’t know why I wanted it so badly. It’s hard to hold and I had to use GLOO to cover up the sharp edges. It probably should’ve gone into the recycler.

I finish my coffee and brew another cup while I try to choke down the rest of breakfast. My new diet of defunct operators has made actual food hard to process. I don’t know if it’s helping or not. I see things better now, at least. The weave is bright and tangible. The Coral, too. I can feel everything around me when the field isn’t up. The only problem so far is that the way it feels changes so frequently. I think I liked congee at one point, but now it tastes like eating a GLOO canister. Next week I might like it again and make myself sick from over-eating again. I haven’t had another breakdown. I haven’t thought about eating anyone. I still dream of glass and doctors, clipboards and clicking pens. Sometimes when it all falls away, I dream of coral and burnt out buildings, of an alien landscape I feel like I should recognize. 

The alarm clock blares again and a cheerful voice tells me that Dr. Khoza is here. The bowl of congee is still half-full. The second cup of coffee is long empty. I shift from pajamas into a uniform as I open the door. Dr. Khoza watches the white briefs fade into red vinyl and frowns. 

“You know you’re supposed to wear your jumpsuit, Morgan.” He doesn’t wait for me to respond before taking a seat at the table and setting out his equipment. 

“I can’t do the tests in it,” I protest. I drum my fingers on the top of the table and try to keep the rest of me still. “I don’t know how to make it shift with me.”

“The suit is meant to monitor your vitals. Think of it as a wearable medical operator or personal doctor.”

“I have plenty of those without a suit," I protest. "When will I get visitors that aren’t doctors?”

He sets the psychotropic field analyzer he’s calibrating down and sighs. I watch the threads around him. They’re still. Completely still. They always are. Usually when someone has a psychoscope on you can see the threads struggling to get in, tangled around the scope and vibrating with stray thoughts. I don’t know how, but Dr. Khoza’s mind is silent and walled off. Not by some unspeakable thing, like Sho or Mikhaila, but something natural. The threads aren’t severed or warped, there is no empty space. They’re just still. He notes something on the clipboard before taking a new checklist out of his folder.

“I’m just the test administrator, Morgan. You’ll have to ask Mr. Yu. Like I said last time.”

He clears his throat to make it clear that he’s done talking and the science operator with him leads me through the first round of tests. Mimic a cup. Phantom shift across the room. Possess the operator. Levitate the table. The only thing he never tests for is telepathic ability. A printer hooked up to the analyzer tells him how much energy I’m using for every action, how it warps the weave around us, and what level of stabilization field would be needed to nullify it. 

I can usually gauge how well I’m doing from the observers’ reactions. These are the only tests I know Sokolov and Ayala listen in on. They go dark when Nguyen and Adesina do mental evaluations, though I think their operator ‘Orwell’ listens in on those. Today their thoughts are loud, but they have nothing to do with the tests. There’s a shuttle docking on Talos. One that didn’t originate here. They sound excited. I catch brief glimpses of memories, hopes for what the shuttle brings. The taste of something called ‘milk’. The smell of disinfectant. Letters in a language I don’t recognize, scribbled in crayon with drawings of a stick house and a setting Earth on the horizon. 

“Will you please pay attention, Morgan,” Dr. Khoza sighs. “I was trying to tell you that your consumption of psionic energy per ability use has gone down since last time. How are you feeling? Tired? Energetic? Any signs of disassociation?”

“I feel fine. It’s like I haven’t done the tests yet. No fatigue. No disassociation.” I clench my fist and unclench it, looking at the five perfectly formed fingers. No smoke escapes the suit. Nothing too long. Nothing out of place. I changed back into Morgan without thinking of him. “I feel more like myself than ever.”

“Good.” He takes another note and stands. The operator diligently bobs beside him. “I’ve forwarded the results to Dr. Nguyen for his afternoon appointment.”

“What does it mean?” He stops working and turns to me. I wait for an answer before continuing. “Why am I using less energy when I use my abilities?”

“It means that your new diet is working.” There is a single beat where the threads huddled at the edges of his psychoscope go rigid, outstretched towards him but with no way to get to his mind. He frowns as he flips the page on his clipboard. “It also has other implications, but I think Dr. Park is best equipped to explain those to you during your next physical.”

I try not to cringe too much at her name. He finishes packing the equipment. Meticulous. Robotic. He reminds me of an operator in his efficiency. Everything has a place. Everything is without a single scratch or dent or even his name written on it. You’d think his equipment was fabricated anew every morning. The operator with him turns its blinking LED to me and slowly, imperceptibly inches away. He clucks his tongue to call it back to him before picking up his briefcase.

“Try to rest before Dr. Nguyen comes. Even if you feel fine, there’s no point in overdoing it.”

I nod and try to look as non-threatening as possible, though the operator still shies away from me as they leave. Once they're gone, I head to the window. Outside is an idyllic view of space without solar cells or orbiting satellites. The moon is full. Earth shines like a perfect blue and green marble backlit by a brilliant sun. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than the city skyline, but it's more familiar. I admire the far too bright moon again before grabbing a permanent marker off the work desk and writing on the glass.

‘Tell me about the shuttle?’

There’s silence from the observers. Ayala is trying not to think. Sokolov’s thoughts are moving too fast for me to pick out anything more than bits of color and sensation. The crush of the atmosphere as you leave it, heading from the pressure of transcending earth into the merciless void. Gravity sickness. A place called ‘Houston’. After a moment I cross the words out and write a new question.

‘What is milk?’

This time I get a vast swath of answers. The feel of pliable, warm skin beneath calloused hands and liquid sloshing into a metal pail. The taste of something cold, rich, and the crunch of biscuits filled with jam. There are sounds I’ve never heard and shapes I couldn’t fathom. I rest my head on the glass to take them all in. Tacked on to the end of every memory is the faint whisper ‘I hope the shuttle brings milk’. I hope it does, too. I want to see what this substance is, if Alex will let me. I don’t even need to see the shuttle itself, just what it brings. New people. New sensations. New thoughts. And maybe milk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear readers, calculus is an abomination that should never have been unleashed upon earth. I am attempting to broker a deal with a demon to escape it, but for now it is eating my soul and, by proxy, my writing time. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with Replica despite the long stretches between updates. You are all wonderful. This orc is humbled by your patience and kind words.
> 
> As always, a special thank you to Wayward_Chronicler who somehow managed to help me edit while also starting the new arc of their fic. If you need something to read to fill the void while Replica is delayed, go check out Wolf of Farore.


	15. The Shape in the Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim realizes he dislikes strobe lights, decides a shoe is a viable weapon, and sees an unpleasantly familiar face.

I dream of shuttles from Mars, streamlined leviathans slowly churning through space. I taste the bitter gold that covers their insides. Crew members glide through the corridors like the lifeblood of the ship being pumped to their stations by some unseen heart. Each one of them is a self-contained universe, populated by sensations I know I shouldn’t know. I dream of perfume that smells like flowers I’ve never seen and leaves a chemical taste in the back of my throat. I dream of songs in languages I’ve never heard and the taste of ‘milk’. I dream of what lays beyond the ship’s hull. There are colors that have weight, that metamorphose into sounds my human self can’t fathom, and finally fade back into blackness. I dream of a long sleep, moving through the sensory panic of dying galaxies until something shakes me out of hibernation.

I wake to klaxons. The air is dense with information, with emotion. Trying to breathe is like trying to digest the whole of a data server. My body tenses and flows around me until its normal enough. Static flickers through me. I feel something tugging me out of the room. It’s gentle. It reminds of when Alex first led me out of the SIM lab and into Morgan’s old room. But it’s empty. There’s nothing in it to latch onto. 

I’m coming apart under the red strobe lights. My body flickers in time with them and the sound of sirens becomes my heartbeat. I fight the urge to turn into a mug and drown out the alarms with the solid, sensory deprivation of being an inanimate object. The PA system is too loud to be anything but Morgan, though. “All Talos employees are advised to go into lockdown procedure. Go to the nearest designated shelter. If you are unable to do so, take cover where you are, activate the ‘panic’ feature on your employee tracking bracelet, and wait for a security response team.”

My TranScribe crackles to life and Alex’s voice greets me. I can barely hear him over the announcements. There’s the hiss-pop of static as the overhead speaker dies and the lights cut out. A female voice somewhere away from Alex swears loud enough for me to hear. He sounds close to the microphone, muffled. I hear every grasp for breath and strained wheeze. 

“Morgan. Thank god. Where are you?”

“I’m in my room.” 

“Stay there. The security team is sweeping that sector.”

“What’s happening?”

“Typhon.” He hisses the word. I can feel it drip from his tongue and burn through the air around him. “They came on the shuttle.”

“What?”

“Just, please, stay where you are. They’re locking down sectors and setting off contained nullwave charges to get rid of the things. You could get hurt.”

“I can help.” Silence. “Alex. I can help. You know I can. You’re the one who ran me through the SIM.”

“Morgan, please, just wait for someone to come get you.” I hear something metallic hit the ground and the sound of shuffling. Alex is quiet. His breathing is hushed. Over the transcribe I hear the all too familiar sound of a phantom voice. There’s a loud crash of static and the voice is gone. Alex is back on the line, breathing heavily now. “Just stay there. We don’t know if your connection to the Coral is back. If these things could control you. It could turn into a nightmare.”

I try not to laugh. He’s right, though. I’ve seen visions of the Coral so clearly since my first encounter with myself. I don’t know how I know they can’t control me, but I know. I’m not cut off, but I’m not part of it anymore. Not the way I used to be. Alex is waiting for a response. Holding his breath. Thinking so loud I can pick up the panic through the transcribe. 

“I’ll be okay, Alex.”

“Morgan…” He sighs. And then he says something in that harsh, guttural language I don’t recognize. The transcribe clatters to the floor. There’s a loud snap of static and then silence. I try to reach out to him, but I can’t. There’s a stabilization field around my new room. I can do whatever I want inside of it, but my thoughts are trapped in the field before they can wander Talos. No way to see through his eyes or know he’s safe. No way to see what’s happening outside except to go out.

I clutch the TranScribe to my chest and, for the first time since I turned off the SIM, put on the uniform. I shove a case of psi-hypo into one of the storage compartments. I go through the list of things I needed in the SIM: a wrench, a suit repair kit, a medkit, null wave charges, and recycling materials. My room isn’t set up for this, though. I find a few more stashed hypos for emergencies, a first aid kit in the bathroom that consists of yellowing plant protein goo and aspirin, and a steel toed shoe that might be heavy enough to break a window. I should stay here. I’m not Morgan. I’m not equipped to go survive an alien invasion, if that’s what’s happening.

I focus on the suit until I can feel the spaces between the threads, until black ink seeps through them and covers it. I pick up the other steel-toed shoe and throw it as hard as I can through the bathroom mirror. Sokolov and Ayala are long gone. The monitoring equipment is strewn haphazardly around the observation area. The air is thick with voices. Electricity licks at my skin and dances around the suit. Golden threads hang heavy in the air, swollen and pulsing with consciousness. It’s not Coral, not yet, but it will be. There are threads tied to objects everywhere in the room. Mugs. Chairs. An on-fire trash can. I walk through them like a spider along a web, chasing vibrations to some unknown prey. I can see the whole of Talos. I’m a mug on Cathy in HR’s desk. I’m a chair in the armory. I’m a mop. I’m a cube. I’m a slightly different mug, running across the floor and shifting mid-step into a small Earth creature. 

I pull away.

The web collapses in on me. 

I’m me again, sitting on the floor of the observation room with bits of broken mirror sticking out of my suit. I cross the room in a single step. It feels natural, not like the tests. The threads give me a framework to move across. They make it easier to travel, easier to hear. Easier to be. I know I shouldn’t be using them like this. I remember what the Coral is a harbinger of, but I also know that the Apex was destroyed. The signals are being sent out into a deaf void.

I follow them through the hallway, out of the observation rooms and into the main labs. The klaxons are still going and the sound crashes around me. I could drown in it. I feel it on my skin and I have to hold onto the walls to steady myself. I see janitors. I see security guards. I see doctors. They have the same thought, under the barrage of memories and fears. ‘How could this happen again?’ I want to know the same thing.

The entire station screams through the Coral, the whirring of Operators and the voices of the crew. All so familiar, and yet I can’t put a face to them. I’ve seen the people on Talos, moved among them either as Morgan or as a passenger behind their eyes, but I don’t know them intimately enough to identify them. In the infinite chorus is a voice louder and more familiar than any of them.

_‘How does it feel?’_ it asks, flickering between itself and Morgan. _‘Like finally coming home, isn’t it?’_

I swear I see it. The face that the voice belongs to. It’s gone in an instant. I reach for the nearest thread and pull, but it’s no good. Something pulls on the other end of the threads, reels me into the decontamination room. The mist I’ve braced myself for never comes. The sensors crackle and spark. The door won’t open. I almost laugh at how similar it is to the SIM, how much I want to just fall back into the familiar routine, the familiar self. It feels more real to me than Talos II, like at any moment I could hear January’s voice or stumble across one of Dahl’s operators. There’s power to the sector. The panel doesn’t look damaged, even if the sensors are. I try the manual lock only to be shocked for my efforts. I’m halfway to becoming a slip of paper and wedging myself through the doors when I hear the voice.

“Like old times,” it hisses. The words slither inside me. I take my hand off of the access panel. Something large and metal hits the ground just beyond my vision. I see a flash of black and hear the phantom voice again. “Set off nullwave charges. Get rid of the things.”

I creep forward from the panel to the outer doors. The power to the main exobiology lab is gone. Everything is completely still. No blinking tower lights from lab computers. No doctors. No operators. I’m halfway through punching in my keycode for a manual override when something slams into the glass. I panic and my hand fazes through the keys. The button sticks, entering ‘4111’ as the code, and the pin-pad shocks me. I don’t try again. I don’t want to now.

There is a thing that’s trying to be Alex outside the door. It’s not doing a very good job of it, either. It walks too straight when it paces. There is no ancient sorrow to weigh it down or gravity to pull at the soft folds. It looks like a simulacra of Alex, put together in the program they use to model machine parts for the fabricators, and given the barest idea how humans move. I see my eyes when I look at it. White and sparking with electricity, split down the middle by skin that isn’t skin. Its form glitches towards the middle, jerks apart and pulls itself back together. It tries to open the door, but it can’t. It rams into the door a few times, bangs its hand on the glass, and tries to overload the power supply to the chamber’s lock. Nothing works. After a few more failures it gives up to look for new prey.

I watch it skulk across the room and, as it moves, melt into ink before reforming as Elazar. It offers itself to the biometrics scanner but is rejected. My safe haven stays sealed. Sho is next. Then Morgan. It’s caught halfway. Morgan’s face is too smooth and soft. It still has Sho’s body, Sho’s face, but copied over just enough Morgan that I know it. Gold threads unravel from it and pull it across the room like a puppet held by an unsteady hand. It’s close enough I can see the sad attempt at a beard it’s replicated. It doesn’t bang on the door this time. It just stands there. Staring.

I want to be scared. I tell myself that I’m supposed to be scared. But I want to go to it, to this thing that looks so much like I once did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not dead, everyone! Despite the best attempts of my Cal. 2 professor. At least we're finally starting to learn about applications to aerospace technology, so that means I'm one step closer to causing the inevitable destruction of earth by making alien contact!
> 
> We're entering what I'm going to fondly call the 'Typhon Cycle' as the last chapter concluded the 'Human Cycle'. The tone is going to shift a little, but I'm trying to keep it true to the original idea. Things are finally starting to pick up around Talos and we're going to hear more about the fate of Earth, as well as that of the colonies. Despite that it is a new cycle, the old plot threads aren't being abandoned. IF anything, expect to see more about Mim's history and creation.
> 
> As usual, thank you so much to everyone who comments! Every time I want to set this fic aside, I see more wonderful comments and I remember why I'm writing this.
> 
> Also as usual, a HUGE thank you to wayward_chronicler for editing for me.


	16. Stranded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim sees faces that shouldn’t be familiar, questions the order of months, and continues to carry a shoe through the station for protection.

The phantom pushes its fingers through the crystalline lattice between us. My hand is frozen, stuck to the glass by an invisible vacuum. It abandons Morgan’s body to become Typhon again. For an instant, I forget about the rest of Talos 2. I stand there, staring at the phantom, and remembering the feeling of being simultaneously everything and nothing. The blackness between the stars that makes up for an uncounted, uncountable amount of the universe. The golden threads extend forever around it, connecting it to that disembodied neural network that I’m no longer a part of.

I pull my hand back and the recoil scrambles my assumed form, if only for a minute. The phantom is up against the glass now, staring at its reflection. Staring at me. 

I hear the unasked question: _Are you one of us?_

No, I want to scream. No. I’m human. But I can’t. I don’t know if it can understand me and I have no reason to care what it thinks of me, but I still can’t lie to it, not about that. And even if I did, I don’t think it would believe me. I can already feel the threads around it, around me, slipping through the microscopic cracks in the glass. It **sees** me.

I stumble backwards as another electric pulse hits the door. The control console sparks and the emergency lockdown systems shudder as the fuse blows. There is a single thought floating in the aether around us: _free._ The console sparks again. Alarms blare somewhere in the distance, signaling a containment breach. Black swirls against the glass on my side of the window. I panic and slam my fist into the ‘emergency open’ button. 

It shifts into the room as soon as there’s a crack between the doors. I expect it to attack, but instead it tentatively reaches out an almost-hand to me. I press my back into the wall, try to inch away. It grabs me and Talos 2 is jolted away more abruptly than any interruption in the SIM.

I hear it. I see the forests, silhouettes of trees shining with captured stars. I see a fleeting glimpse of some unnamed leviathan in an embryonic state, being spun from gold and dark matter. I see a human face that is and isn’t mine, red eyes, red lights, sirens, and featureless people in hazmat suits. A whistle of air. A sharp cry. The sharp tendrils of a phantom are moving to the sides of my vision. I feel something cold slip inside me and then my body is static. Not my body, not this one, not Morgan. A body I think I had before this. I can feel it trying to take shape.

My thoughts crack and blackness floods in through the gap. As abruptly as it came, the vision is gone. I feel something tugging me out of myself as the threads of Coral retreat.

The suit is black. Whatever I’m made of has leaked out through it, reformed. My Transtar uniform is somewhere inside of me. The me that’s outside of the suit gives the phantom pause. I panic. Programming takes over. I open the doors to my room, shove the phantom back with a telekinetic blast, and lock it in. It stands there, watching me. Confused. Betrayed. In the sim, this is where I’d throw an explosive canister at it or use a power to kill it. I could harvest ‘exotic material’. Use it for more hypos. The feeling of unreality, of being back inside the machine, is broken when it taps on the glass. I run.

I run before I can apologize. Before I can let it out. Before I have to feel the embrace of the Coral again. Before I have to see that face, the one I shouldn’t recognize. I can’t interface with the Coral properly anymore. The neural state that they transferred into me from April wasn’t built for it. But it’s changing. My mind doesn’t have to be April’s. The longer I’m out of the SIM, the more neurodivergence there is. That bond could reform, just like Alex was afraid of.

I need to find him before it does.

I stretch and shift through a hallway barricaded with GLOO. My footsteps ring hollow in the empty labs. It’s all too much like the simulation. But I’m hopeful. There are no corpses, not yet. The first sign of life I find is in the lobby. There’s a black splatter on the floor that used to be a mimic and an abandoned pistol beside it. No body. No phantom. Just a dead mimic. A water fountain is covered in GLOO. The elevator is offline, which I’d expected. The stairs are on fire, which I had not. Someone trailed a thick line of something down the entire stairwell and set it aflame, preventing anything other than a thermal phantom from following them. I twist out along a thread of the weave until I reform at the top of the stairs. I stumble to my feet and bump into trashcan that has no business being upside down or half an inch off the ground.

I’m halfway down the hall before the mimic lunges at me. I turn. Living ink covers my face. Tendrils wrap around my torso. I feel it trying to get inside me and I think of Bellamy. There’s no ‘inside’ to get into, but Morgan’s old fear is there, screaming at me to get away. My arm dissolves and reforms. The mimic doesn’t make a sound as it’s impaled. I stare in shock as it dissolves and slips down my arm, landing on the floor with a distinct ‘splat’. My hand is shaking. I can’t get it to turn back into a hand. The fingers stay too long and too numerous. I know the way a phantom’s arm can become sharp and rigid, how the tendrils form together into a spearhead. I was in front of them too many times in the sim. I don’t like being on the other end. Why did it feel so easy in the Sim?

I keep replaying that instant. It was so fast, but I can almost pinpoint the second where my body made the choice for me. I felt it. A single vibration in the weave where it touched the coral. A single thought moving through the mimic’s body: “food”. There was nothing else. Not before or after I killed it.

There was nothing else.

I replenish my energy with a hypo, grab the pistol, and keep moving. I have to remind myself that they aren’t like us. They aren’t like me. No self. No emotions. No empathy. Everything I remember from the time before tells me that. I used to be one of them. I know how they work. I have to focus on getting to Alex or finding Elazar. Hopefully the latter first. This is the worst time to have an existential crisis and empathize with Typhon. Maybe if I’d met the phantom in a lab setting. Maybe if it was part of a test, if it was in a controlled environment. But it wasn’t.

As I traverse the empty corridors, I make a mental list of what I need to do. There are no missions on my TranScribe, no conveniently named sets of goalposts, and no list of items I need. I don’t know what to do unless I decide what needs to be done. Autonomy is terrifying. I try to prioritize things the way I think Morgan would: Find survivors, figure out what happened, figure out how to stop it, and try to keep it from happening again. I now have a pistol with no ammunition, one less hypo than I started with, a malfunctioning TranScribe, and a shoe. This could probably be going better.

Once I’m out into the lobby I can hear the speakers again. There’s a new warning playing.

“…the presence of _Typhon Andromimesi_ s. All Talos employees are to keep their psychoscopes on at all times. Do not open a door for anyone without a badge. I repeat, do not open any doors for an employee without a badge. If you are approached by an unfamiliar employee bearing a badge, ask them to recite a simple phrase or copy a series of gestures.”

_Typhon Andromimesis_. I think I saw that somewhere in the files on Cobalt. It was a type of theoretical Typhon that could copy human appearance and behavior. Like a phantom, but more convincing. Like the Typhon I saw in the observation lab.

_Not like you, though._ the familiar voice echoes through the weave. 

“No. That is me. Was me. It’s in my dossier.” I hate how unsure I sound. I’m long past the confusion at arguing with an inner voice and losing. After all, I’m not the first Morgan to talk to myself on a regular basis. I didn’t have a January, so I made one. Maybe I should name the voice March. 

I sidestep a mimic encased in GLOO as I retrace the route to Alex’s office. At some point, I realize the PA system isn’t looping. I’m nearly to the security station and I haven’t heard it repeat itself. Someone is there giving status updates minute-by-minute, giving information about the new creatures. By now everyone on Talos knows exactly what to look for. I went from hoping to find someone to praying I don’t run into any survivors in case they think I’m one of the invaders. How would they even tell me apart from them if all they had was a psychoscope? What would it say when they look at me?

_You know exactly what it would say. Why do you keep pretending you’re a phantom? A mimic?_

“Shut up!” I scream at nothing. A suspicious chair topples over and rolls three feet to the left. I can feel the other mimics. The chair. The potted plant on the desk. The box of eel sushi. Around the hidden mimics, there’s a tangle of threads that intersect the Coral in all directions. It’s like nothing I saw in the debriefing videos or the Sim. I try to remember if the mimic that attacked me had any connections around it, but I can’t. The threads vibrate around them. Every nanometer of movement communicates something new about their environment. Every signal subtly alters their makeup. They haven’t sent out a distress call. Not yet.

_Because you’re not a threat. Or a meal._

_They know what you are._

_Better than you do._

I don’t argue. March—or May, I haven’t decided—has a point. But it’s moot, really. Of course they know me better than I do. That’s how Coral works. You see and hear and feel everything that comes spiraling off of someone. You can taste and even absorb their thoughts, what makes them who they are. 

So March already knows what I’m doing next. I’m taking my hypos, my bandages, my suit, and my trusty shoe and I’m finding Alex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One day the once a month updates will get back down to twice a month. One day. But not this day.
> 
> Finals are coming up and soon Mittens will be free! Or at least free of that specific academic obligation.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who continues to read and comment in spite of the horribly sporadic schedule. You all have more patience than I ever will and I am very grateful for it. (If you're reading this upon update, I will reply to the month old comments tomorrow. I swear.)


	17. A Shoe-In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim finds both offensive and defensive uses for a shoe, realizes the weapon potential of staplers, and fails at Spanish.

The offices on either side of me are empty. The flashing red lights are still going, still telling the empty stations to seek shelter. There’s no coral here yet. Nothing moves through the hallways. There’s a Styrofoam tray with half of someone’s lunch still in it upended onto the floor. A crushed can lies in a pool of coffee just outside of the senior director’s office. It looks like someone stepped on it. The door is flung open and, inside, I can see the blinking red dot of a TranScribe.

I slip through the field of desks, touching but not really touching the debris on the floor. It takes me a while to realize my feet never hit the ground. There’s a thin cushion of air beneath me, swirling and stretched like ink bleeding across paper. I swear I feel March trying to draw my attention to it. Maybe if March was half as helpful as January I’d be more inclined to listen, but so far they’re just the speaker for my existential crisis. I can ignore them. I have a purpose now, a focus: find Alex. As long as that’s at the forefront of my mind I can ignore everything else.

A cup of instant udon hits me before I get to the TranScribe. It bounces off the collar of the suit and lands at my feet. I nudge it with my foot and then, when it doesn’t turn into a mimic, kick it under a desk. There are no threads around it. I shouldn’t have had to test it. Something in me keeps pulling, pulling away from the offices, pulling farther into Talos, and I can’t think. As I pick up the udon, a mug smacks me in the leg. I repeat one of the many phrases in German Alex told me not to say. I hear a small gasp, but no one speaks. I feel it now, the human energies in the room. They’re masked by something, though. That might explain why I haven’t seen any corpses. I wait a second to see if anything else hits me and, when it doesn’t, I slip into the director’s office.

The TranScribe blinks intermittently, drawing attention to its many unseen messages. I don’t see blood on the floor as I approach. I don’t feel any Typhon nearby. I was expecting a more grisly scene, like the sim. There every transcribe told of a tragedy. Every empty room was a morgue. I don’t think I’d be able to take it, not now, not with so much coral around. Even without the fully formed threads in the room and no dead bodies, the panic is starting to pool inside me. I take a deep breath. My form expands to fill the suit. I taste static. 

I taste electricity.

In the corner of the room, something dark and heavy yawns to life. I grab the TranScribe and shift over the desk to the door just in time for it to lock into place.

“Alien threat detected,” a familiar voice drones. The grinding of gears stops, replaced by a smooth whirring of parts. My feet are halfway through the floor, stuck in place by a sudden lack of belief in reality. I shift into a TranScribe as the hail of bullets starts. It recalibrates and focuses on my position. It cuts through the plush red carpeting around me as I roll under the desk.

They fired on me in the SIM, too. I should’ve expected it. I huddle against the metal drawers and listen to the steady sound of tearing metal. There’s nothing in my suit to disable a turret. Even the pistol I picked up, which I’m still not sure I know how to use, is empty. The director’s TranScribe is on the other side of the room. No calling for help. I could hit it with telekinesis, but I’d need to have line of sight and I don’t want to find out whether or not I can survive being shot. A bullet ricochets off the desk and knocks a rolling chair backwards. The sound of reverberating metal sends ripples through my already disrupted body. The chair rolls over and clangs off my abandoned boot.

The boot! 

I twist around to grab the boot and duck back behind the desk as a bullet hits the corner. Then, I wait. There is a slowing of air movement, a stale quality to the atmosphere. The turret clicks and pauses for a half second to reload. The boot hits it hard enough to knock it on its side. The next spray of bullets hits nothing but the wall. It takes me a minute to crawl out from behind the desk. I know it can’t right itself. That doesn’t take away the panic. I can feel myself reaching out to it, grabbing at the energy, at the shreds of VI, like Sho tearing at her box of eel rolls. The turret is too potentially valuable, though. I creep behind it, staying well out of the limited range of fire, and tap into infinite pool of knowledge on Talos. Somewhere in Sector B is a security officer named Theophania—which she hates—who knows the override codes for Typhon-sensitivity in turrets. She has two Typhon-based neuromods, one that allows her to shift and one that allows her to resist etheric attacks. I wait. I slip into her thoughts when she shifts across the cargo bay and briefly interfaces with the weave. My hands work without me. When the turret stops firing and I pull back into myself, I don’t remember any of the codes. This is where an actual neuromod would be useful. The turret folds up to be transported while I resume being Morgan.

The rest of the office is quiet. No more projectiles. Nothing vibrating within the weave. I feel something, white noise in my peripheral, but it’s nothing I can identify. The human feel from earlier is gone.

I pick up the boot and the Transcribe, hoping beyond hope that it still works despite the bullet lodged in the casing. My breath catches when the power button sticks. It’s tasteless. Colorless. I can’t sense anything within it. The world around me filters into white noise as I watch the cracked screen light up. Finally, I see a badly pixilated command menu and, with some difficulty, navigate to the most recent transmission.

“This is Security Officer Truong. Due to the unknown intelligence of _Andromimesis_ , we’re sending the location of each sector’s shelter to the department supervisors rather than announcing it over the PA. Each supervisor is responsible for the safety of those in their department during lockdown. Employees in Sector A are to report to Cargo Bay 2C. Employees in Sector B are to report to the cafeteria. Employees in Sector C are to report to Maintenance Room 21D. Employees in Sector D and the adjacent labs are to remain where they are until a security detail comes to escort them to shelter.”

I heard the phantom quoting the security officers, but I never saw any of them. No bodies. No personnel. It’s too much to think that they all made it out unscathed. I know how phantoms are made, how the Typhon find their own way to ‘live inside’ humans. I play the next message and hope for answers.

“Officer Truong, this is science officer Parata, we’re down in sector B, unit A.” He goes silent and the TranScribe crackles. In the background, someone is swearing. I hear a phantom speak, a crackling mimicry of the announcement over the PA. Then gunshots. The deafening blast of a shotgun that turns the world too many colors and stings your skin. “We need backup down here ASAP. They’re—fuck! Jesus. It turned into Kylie. It just…it killed her and then it turned into her. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes I’d think it was actually her. You need to get down here.”

“We’ve got a detachment in your area, officer Parata. They should be securing the laboratory storage area now. Just sit tight.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re not—” The message cuts off. The TranScribe’s display has morphed into bars of color. Morgan would be able to repair it. I could too, probably. I know his research. It was part of the imprinting from April. I’m sure the schematics of a TranScribe are in there somewhere. I stuff it in one of the suit’s pockets until I can find a workbench. If worse comes to worse and I can’t fix it, there’s still the weave to guide me.

Something thrums beyond my vision. It doesn’t appear, but rather it vanishes. Something very conspicuously ceases to be. I turn in time to see a mug shatter as a stapler collides with it. There are eight TranStar mugs on a nearby desk, not one of them with the golden threads affixed to them. A second later a jar of paperclips knocks another mug off the desk. It isn’t heavy enough to break it, though. I inch closer to see who this assailant of mugs is. 

I should expect the stapler. I do not. It hits my jaw and I stumble backwards as my body tries to remember how to react to sudden pressure. I think this is when a human would bruise.

“Stay back! I’m not afraid of some mutant mimic!”

“Mimic?” I dodge the box of staples this time, but I must have shifted to do so. The eyes beneath the desk are wide and wary. I hold up my hands in what I’ve heard is a gesture of meaning no harm.

“What’s the capitol of Delaware?” the crewmember yells. Their voice cracks like a phantom’s. I see something shake, something catch the light.

“What?”

I avoid a can of coffee. Barely.

“What country is Madrid in?”

“I don’t know what a Madrid is! I’m not from Earth!” I hold up the boot to block the glinting scissors in the crewmember’s hand. The projectile never comes, though. Instead, they slowly inch out from beneath the desk. Their suit is too big. Their psychoscope is broken and energy seeps out from the cracks in the lens. It intermittently shields their thoughts and their energy signature from view. They have a third stapler in hand as they approach.

“Who are you?” They ask without waiting for a reply. Their eyes go to the nameplate on my suit. When I mimic it, it always says Morgan. The real one doesn’t. They mouth the word incredulously, but the confusion is never replaced with the fear I expect. “Cobalt? Is that your real name or a ‘the Yus imported me from a Russian prison’ name?” 

They laugh at the indescribable face I feel myself making and twist out from under the desk. “I’m kidding. At this point I wouldn’t care if you were a Russian convict, as long as you weren’t a Typhon.”

The silence creeps in as they eye one of the many mugs by the coffee maker. I shift between feet. They toss the stapler to their other hand. I try to focus on their suit, on what the colors mean about their rank and their nameplate.

“Oliveira,” I read. They frown and I try again, emphasizing a different sound this time. I think it’s wrong again, but they appear to appreciate the attempt.

“Just call me Jaime.”

“I’m Mim.” I shift my weight onto a different foot. Something inside me balls together, tighter and more restrained. I know their psychoscope is broken, abandoned entirely on the floor, but I’m still self-conscious. I keep thinking about the Arboretum with Sho. About her face when she saw me lose Morgan’s form. I fight the urge to use up another hypo, just to make sure I can stay me. 

“I had a friend named ‘Mim’. It’s Hebrew, right?”

“Maybe?”

“My, uhm, my father. He was Chinese and….” I let the words hang in the air and Jaime draws their own conclusions. After a second, they thump my back.

“You and your shoe seem formidable. Want to go with me to the shelter?”

“I’m heading the opposite way, actually. To station security.” This is too soon. Too early. I haven’t had enough tests with regular crew members. On top of that, they just saw me, in no particular order: hack a turret with my mind, shape-shift, and phantom shift. I take a step away without meaning too. My eyes go to the door. “Are you sure you even want to travel with me? You thought I was a mimic a minute ago…”

“Yeah. Sorry about that I haven’t seen anyone like you in a long time. You’re one of the xeno-modders, right?”

“The what?”

“Xeno-mod. I don’t know what they call them where you’re from. That’s what we called the soldiers that got those Typhon neuromods installed.”

“Oh. Yeah. Something like that.”

“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. I wouldn’t either. What they did to the guys I knew who had it done, it wasn’t right. Shipping them up here or quarantining them down on earth….Might as well be a death sentence.”

I wince. They cough and tap their hands together. There’s a faint movement of air near them as thoughts struggle to form.

“So, uh, do you have that thing where you can tell what is and isn’t a mimic?”

“Mostly,” I admit. Jaime seems pleased. “You can see this outline of coral around them, like strings coming off them. Sometimes an active psychoscope in the area makes it hard, though.”

“Can you tell if someone’s one of those Andromimesis things?”

I nod.

“That makes you my new favorite person.”

“Thanks?” I attempt a smile. My lips stay shut and my eyes close, but it feels natural enough. Jaime laughs. There’s no mirth, though. I think again how wrong all of Igwe’s emotion cards were.

“Can I go with you to security?” The fear bubbles up inside them again. More nervous laughter. “I’m not exactly an action hero, even if my expert stapler throwing convinced you otherwise.”

Jaime has a working TranScribe, probably. That’s invaluable. Jaime is also a human, a full-fledged one, and that’s likely going to be invaluable as well; I’m not sure how many times I’m going to have to prove that I’m not one of the invading _Andromimesis_. 

“Okay.” I pick up the faux-gold TranStar stapler at my feet and hand it back to my new companion. “We should probably get moving.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finals are done! Thank god. This chapter would have been posted so much sooner if it wasn't for finals. Thank you, everyone, for being patient. This chapter is considerably longer than usual in the hopes of making up for how long it took to update. The 'Typhon Arc' of the story is in full swing now and things should start picking up. More new humans. More new powers. More shoes!
> 
> I apologize to everyone for this chapter's tile. Wayward_Chronicler wasn't here to tell me not to use it.


	18. Mind Jack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim discovers the value of team lifting, has memories he doesn’t remember, and learns colorful metaphors that Alex would disapprove of.

Jaime and I take turns carrying the hacked turret. It isn’t heavy, not to me, but I let it seem like it is so they don’t question it. I’m a ‘xeno-mod’ to them, but still human. Humans have a lot more physical limits than Typhon. I haven’t had enough time to study what they are, but I try to err on the side of caution. If I don’t think Alex could do it, I at least act like it’s difficult. 

Every so often Jaime checks their TranScribe to see if we’re going the right way. I let them think that they’re leading. The coral guides me, just like the weave follows me. I keep slipping between them, catching fragments of what’s happening in Talos. I was hoping that having Jaime here would help keep me grounded. Instead the constant worry of exposing myself is driving me further away, into the gold wisps.

“Hey, it’s my turn to haul the turret,” Jaime says and swats my arm. “I thought you said you weren’t one of those badass action hero types. You’re not even breaking a sweat.”

_Must be the neuromods. What was it, Leverage II? One of about a dozen you had in the SIM._

“Leverage mod. Level 2,” I lie.

_Standard issue to ground troops during the Moltke incidents, wasn’t it?”_

“Standard issue to ground troops in Moltke,” I don’t lie.

Jaime accepts the almost-falsehood without question as I wonder who I was inside that had those mods. I’ve ridden behind so many eyes and walked along so many thoughts that I can’t remember them all. Maybe it was one of the security officers. After a moment I realize my companion isn’t walking and, finally, hand over the turret. The broken psychoscope masks their thoughts. They’re pulled away in a slow current of leaked etheric energy. Their face, however, is close enough to ‘upset’ that I’m worried they’ve found me out.

“So, what kind of security officer carries around a boot for a weapon?”

“One who isn’t a security officer?”

“You’re shitting me,” Jaime exclaims loudly enough to shake the weave and probably attract the attention of a Typhon. “All those mods and you expect me to believe you’re not security?”

“You watched me throw a shoe at a turret. While yelling a very drawn out ‘no’. Is that a thing security officers do?”

“I saw one run down the hallways screaming ‘nope’ after Cathy from HR turned back into a phantom.” Jaime shrugs as best they can while holding the turret. “You’d make a better security guy than half of the people I’ve seen actually doing security.”

“Thanks?” I cock my head and blink a few times in what I hope looks like confusion. Jaime shrugs yet again. I copy the gesture. “I’m not security. I don’t have the right design for it, not out here.”

“Gotcha.” They nod and—though I’m not sure what they understand about that—I accept that the conversation is over. “So, what do you actually do?”

I am wrong. The conversation is still going.

“Neurological research involving personality drift from installing and removing neuromods.” Jaime laughs, sincerely at first and then with the slow awkward shifts in tone that Sho sometimes uses when she makes jokes about Alex. There is a moment of silence when the laughter trails off and I realize they’re waiting for me to speak again. “It’s not as boring as it sounds?”

They laugh again and shift the turret. I hold out my hands to take it and, after a sufficiently obvious frown, Jaime hands it back to me.

“Guess I might as well make use of those mods, since you’re here,” they sigh. “You’re seriously a researcher, though?”

“Something like that.” I heft the turret onto my shoulder and wrap an arm tightly around it. I wonder how much it weighs. I wonder how you tell. I remember, faintly, being a mimic and having no concept of weight or gravity, being one of those trashcans that hovers just off of the ground because you don’t know you’re heavier than air. Jaime regards me silently, but doesn’t push. Talos has a bad history, a history that people don’t want to discuss, and ‘volunteers’ come up a lot in it. The less I say, the more gaps they fill in on their own. Dr. Adesina taught me that. ‘What you don’t say often tells people more than what you do.’ It’s probably bad if you’re a human, but it’s useful if you’re not.

_You know they’re going to figure it out eventually._

March slithers along the Coral, hiding in the vibrations of Talos’ crew. He draws my attention outward, towards a bright knot in the weave. It takes too long to realize I’m in the lead and that, now, Jaime is following me with stapler brandished threateningly. I see us walking down the hallway from March’s perspective, just Morgan Yu and a human resources employee. We look normal. We look scared. But I feel calm, calmer than I have in ages. 

What did March say before? ‘Like finally coming home.’

Jaime abruptly stops as their TranScribe snaps to life.

“Oliviera,” a voice yells. “Where have you been? Why are you just now in range?”

“Tatsuya?” They bounce on the balls of their feet, briefly, before looking overcome with either fear or rage. “Where the hell have I been? Where the hell have you been? The whole sector cleared out when Cathy went phantom and no one felt the need to look under the desks?”

“The security team registered you as dead, Jaime,” the voice on the other line drones. This sparks another argument. More incredulity. More anger. The emotions burn through the weave, making the world far too bright and giving the air a taste like electric discharge. I try to filter it out and follow March.

_They die, you know._

_And then get mad at each other for dying. Listen to them, tearing the weave apart. And you want to be one of them?_

I keep ignoring March. He has a point, though. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of what it feels like to be human. I push it down, focus on the golden web around me. All around me are the trembling threads that the Typhon move across and the prey stuck in them. The gravity in my center pulls at it. The world gets brighter, just a little. The voices around me come into focus and I taste gold. 

Alex warned me. My connection to the Coral isn’t gone, just dormant.

_Let’s hope it doesn’t wake up. Alex said it could be a real nightmare._

I fill the space inside me with thoughts of my brother and try not to leave any cracks for March to crawl into. I think of Space Conquistadores and broken arms and the wistful look on his face when he watches Igwe play Gymopedie 3. I think of Sho and Duck beer. I think of Jaime and their stapler. March relents somewhat, but keeps pulling into the station. I wish I had January instead. For as familiar as the scenario is, it still feels so alien.

Talos should be dark. The lights should be flickering. It should be like the SIM, with leaking pipes and fallen cables. But this sector is bright and white and clean. The fluorescent lights lick at my skin. The smell of bleach seeps into me. I squint against the hum of the bulbs overhead. Jaime looks relieved, as if the bright lights could tell them which mug is secretly alive. They put a hand on my shoulder and grin. I return the gesture. The psychoscope bleeds out between us and we both look away, trying to pretend we know what the other is thinking. 

Just ahead, I see the knot in the Coral pulsing, pumping stolen thoughts out through the threads like blood. The threads snap and sing with movement. And then the world twists. Gold fades to bright violet and cracks, turns to white. Something screams silently. 

Across the hall, a shadow coalesces into solid form. A Typhon. I can’t make out what it is from this distance, but I can take a guess from the gibbering lab assistant following it.

“Hostia puta,” Jaime gasps.

“I think it’s—”

“It’s one of those…” They pause, gesticulate wildly with their free hand, and hiss. “It’s one of those mind-controlling, ass-faced Typhon!”

The yelling gets its attention. I resist the urge to become a mug. The lab assistant breaks into a sprint. Jaime hurls the stapler at them and knocks a paperweight onto the floor. I freeze. I know what happens next. I can see it. They come. They grab Jaime. Their head explodes. The telepath uses the chaos to take control of my new companion. They die.

That isn’t what happens, though.

I move out of the suit, out of myself, and I let go of the gravity within me. I feel the telepath, the whole shape of it beyond that inky black mass in front of me. The weave avoids it, warps around it. I feel gravity inside me. I feel myself step out, feel a black hole open where I was. A star dies. And solar flares push out into the world. The coral is pulled inside of me, twists, and changes. The lab assistant grabs their head and screams before falling to their knees. Jaime is yelling somewhere miles away. The telepath expands across the room. Violet overtakes everything. 

Except here. Except where I am. It touches the weave around me and jerks back.

The lab assistant clutches their head. Their thoughts unravel, frantic fears birthing galaxies of knotted weave. 

The gravity stops. The violet light hardens and fractures. The telepath makes a sound like metal against glass. Something pulls at me, a million somethings from all angles, trying to pull me apart. It’s brief and painful. When it ends, I hear March. I see that unidentifiable face.

_So, what are we going to do with it now?_

I’m inside myself again. The lab tech is hiding behind Jaime. Jaime is holding their stapler threateningly. The telepath waits, docile, bent. Gold light surrounds it, but the threads it spun through the room are broken and scattered. Tendrils of violet move around it, through it. It isn’t dead or injured; it’s just waiting. 

_Tell me you at least had a plan when you mind controlled that thing._

I did not have a plan and March knows it. Thankfully I don’t have to try to answer. More survivors are starting to gather in the hallway, shaking their heads and stretching as they wake from their recent neural hijacking. The lab tech runs to them. Jaime starts to join the newly formed group, but stops.

“Holy shit,” they say and punctuate the statement with a soft whistle. I think it’s supposed to be a compliment. The stapler is still held tight. The psychoscope continues to fail at masking their fear. “What kind of mods did you say you had?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first chapter that my usual editor has not been present for, so I apologize in advance for any mistakes. I am, in fact, a Typhon trying very hard to sound human. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
> 
> In other news, I'm starting a new job. This means that updates are going to either be on a more regular schedule or even worse. I suppose we'll know soon. That said, the 'Replica Outtakes' will hopefully continue to pad the time between chapters. I have a small stock of them, but I am opening 'question prompts' in case anyone has a situation they would like to see Mim in. For instance "Has Mim ever been drunk?", "Can Mim play piano?", etc.
> 
> Alternate titles suggested by New Beta Reader:  
> 'When life gives you Typhons, make Typhon-Aid'  
> 'Breath of the Typhon'  
> 'I think, therefor I can'


	19. One More Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim loses an argument with himself, attempts to use the recycler for unapproved items, and discovers that Jaime does not know ASL.

We haven’t spoken much since the telepath. Jaime watches me warily. The lab tech won’t make eye contact. The other survivors have finally rallied, despite being initially wary of us. The self-appointed leader, someone with a science officer uniform and senior management stripes on his arm, approaches me. His hand is outstretched and empty, but I still take a step back. He doesn’t have a psychoscope, which is the only thing that convinces me to talk to him.

“Hey, there,” he says with a smile worn only by men in cigar advertisements. “I’m Officer John Emond. Head of the botany research team.”

“Oh,” I reply, scrambling to remember anything I’ve heard about the team other than the lichen Alex named after our mother. “You make the mushroom noodles.”

I hear Jaime’s hand hit their psychoscope. I’m afraid I have made an irreparable social faux pas, but Officer Emond laughs.

“We designed most of the crops here that grow with limited resources in low gravity, but yes. I’m the mushroom guy.” He continues to smile. His thoughts are muted, dimly lit. They don’t travel far from him and hold nothing that I could grab onto. I’ve seen him before, heard him, in a commercial for Martian grown food. The way he holds himself now is the same.

_Ever heard of selling an image? I think Morgan used to be pretty good at it._

“You really saved our bacon back there with the telepath. We’d be honored to have you with us on the way back to the shelter, if you’re heading that way.”

“Why are you shaking hands with that thing,” the lab technician screeches. My vision flickers and my skin pricks. The weave shakes with the fear, the hatred, carried in his voice. I take a step back towards Jaime.

“I believe his name is Mr. Cobalt, not ‘that thing’,” Emond says, never once dropping his smile. “And I think we owe him at least a ‘thank you’, Mr. Humbert.”

“Yeah,” another person exclaims. “It’s not like you were going to get rid of that telepath. None of us were. We hit the jackpot, finding a xeno-mod Lunie.”

“He’s not some Lunarian solder, Jian. Look at him! Only reason he’s not sweating bullets is because it’s so goddamn cold in here.” Another survivor gestures at me and yells. “I bet he’s one of the Typhon.”

“A typhon spy? Listen to yourself, dumbass! They’re not advanced enough to send spies out. Christ. I saw a mimic disguised as a chair clipping through a desk like a glitched simulation asset.”

“He served at Moltke,” Jaime interjects. “He told me about his mods before. Standard stuff for the Mare Tranquillitatis ground forces.”

A few of the people murmur and look in my direction. I don’t know what emotion my face betrays, but it seems to assuage their fears. Do I look honest? Do I look as guileless as Igwe or as open as Alex? Why can’t they tell I’m lying?

_You never stopped to think that maybe you aren’t lying, did you?_

I didn’t. For obvious reasons. I have enough phantom memories that if I indulged all of them I’d lose my mind. Better to be Morgan, to be April, and just accept that. It was hard enough to even get that much information and I’m still not sure if I’m better off for it. Whoever’s mind I got part of through all of the neuromods and Typhon material isn’t me. And even if they are, this isn’t the time to worry about it.

_Keep telling yourself that. It’s not like you can ask anyone about it, not now anyway._

Somewhere outside of March, I hear the crewmembers arguing. Voices I can’t put faces to insist I should be in quarantine or that I should be the group leader or that I should be shot. There are too many at once. Too many voices. Too many thoughts. Too many emotions. It’s too loud and bright. My skin contracts until it’s barely clinging to the inside of the suit, like it wants me to get smaller. I tune it out. I drift through the tangled threads of the weave and into the telepath floating down the hallway, following the invisible path I laid out for it. It heads to the material research labs and the ‘xenobiotic disposal chamber’—a glorified recycler. I’ve only seen it in action once, during a brief tour Alex gave me of the labs. I remember hating it.

_This is your grand plan? Get rid of your best chance at survival so you don’t have to think about it?_

It’s a cop out. I know that. I know I could keep it under my control, use it as a proxy to turn other Typhon to our cause. I could just abandon the group, go into the station with my new plaything, and find Alex faster than I ever would with human companions. But I don’t know how long I could keep it up. I have a limited stash of psi-hypo and I haven’t seen a single operator since I started out, so I don’t have a lot of options if I run out.

_You know, no one would miss that technician. Ryan Humbert. Accounting. The least liked human in this sector. I don’t think he’s ever said the name ‘Mr. Yu’. He usually just calls Alex some combination of slurs. Your brother might even be grateful if you ate him._

The telepath is standing in front of the chamber when I realize that someone, or something, is going to have to push the button. I pick up my shoe and the broken TranScribe, then start walking. No one stops me. March doesn’t say anything, but I can feel the smug satisfaction. I really, really wish that I had January instead. At least January’s goal was mutually assured destruction; that’s a lot easier to ignore. March actually made a good point. Good enough that I was considering reading Ryan’s mind and seeing how true it was what he said about Alex. But I don’t. And I don’t plan to go back to do so. All I can hope for is that by the time I get back from dealing with the telepath, the other group has moved on. No people means no temptation. Sure, it’ll be lonely, but it’ll also be easier if I don’t have to play human.

I stop at a water fountain to get something, anything, with weight inside me. It tastes flat. Dead. I think about heading back to my room for the thermos with the psychotropic particle infuser. I’m not Morgan, though. I’m not that brave. I am not heading back there where that Thing-That-Isn’t-Alex is waiting. 

How do you even fight a phantom that looks like a person? Can you? What does it say about you if you kill a replica of someone you used to love?

 _You should ask Alex._

For once, he isn’t smug, isn’t trying to goad me on. This time, March sounds sad. My thoughts tangle together. I could stop. I could just not save Alex. I could go after Sho or Igwe instead. Why not? Weren’t they the ones who taught me the most or tried to tell me the truth? 

I feel static closing in around me, a void that eats thoughts.

“Hey, you okay?” Jaime is standing over me. The turret is braced against their shoulder and a bag full of supplies is slug across their back. I don’t remember sitting down. I don’t remember dividing supplies either. I start to ask Jaime how long I’ve been gone, but nothing comes out. They tilt their head to the side before slouching against the wall and dropping onto the floor beside me. “What happened?”

I shake my head.

“Do you need a doctor?”

I shake my head again. I open my mouth and what comes out is the crackling of electricity. I try to remember the hand words Igwe showed me. I manage ‘Thank you’ and what I hope means ‘I’m fine’. I’m not sure if Jaime understands it, but they don’t seem to believe me either way. Jaime starts to stand. Words crackle out of me again, understandable only through the weave. Jaime sits.

We don’t say anything for a while, which is good. I try to find my words. I know if I speak now what will come out will be a phantom’s voice. That isn’t what I want Jaime to hear. The only sound between us is the slow ‘tap tap pat’ of my hands against my legs. It gets faster every so often, when I almost manage to make a word, and then trails off as I think about the static that came out last time. Somewhere in the distance the threads vibrate, carrying bits of the crew members’ argument to us. I drum my hands on my knees and try to capture the vibrations of Tchaikovsky instead. Luckily, they break the silence first.

“The crew’s split. Some of them want to go to the shelter, others want to go to the security checkpoint. Apparently there’re a few people who have been waiting for a chance for play hero.” Jaime laughs, hollow and sharp. The stapler is still in their hand. “You know, despite all the containment breach drills we had to go through, I’m pretty sure we all thought it was just to cover upper management’s asses and not because it was an actual possibility. Leonard over there, he’s practically giddy. He wants to fight Typhon. ‘Get revenge for Earth’ he said. What the hell?”

I hum in what I hope sounds like agreement. Jaime leans forward and puts their head in their hands. They sigh heavily. I remember the broken clock. Sitting on the floor, hunched over, watching the bits of weave move through my fingers and around the broken pieces of plastic. I remember Igwe. I scoot closer and put my hand on Jaime’s shoulder. If I let go of my focus, I can hear Leitner. It seems to move in time with the pulsing weave.

“Who are you looking for, Mim?” Jaime doesn’t look up when they speak. Their voice sounds like mine when I haven’t quite become fully human yet. “You’re heading to security, but you don’t sound like the others…I’ve never even seen you fire that pistol; so I know you’re not going there for the armory. It has to be the wristbands, the trackers.”

“A friend,” I choke out. The vowels are almost nonexistent. The consonants are too sharp. I feel my mouth reforming around the words until it’s close enough to human that I can speak. “She works in deep storage.”

“Sho, right?”

“Yes.” The water inside me sinks and rises, creates an unpleasant feeling of tangibility. I wonder if I could turn into a mug. Would the water end up inside the mug or in a puddle on the floor? I don’t meet Jaime’s eyes. I don’t ask how they knew.

“You were on Talos I, weren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I say and my voice crackles. My skin slips outside of my suit, pinpricks of blackness standing up against the fabric like ferrofluid. “The neuromods. My memory is shot full of holes.”

“So, you know security is the other direction, right?”

“I’m going to the recycler. Down the hall.”

Jaime lets out a thoughtful hum and stretches. I’m coming to dislike the broken psychoscope they wear. It serves no purpose, really, except making it impossible for me to read their thoughts. Just enough comes through on the weave that it’s like picking up a radio signal that’s not quite out of range and not quite in range. I don’t know what they think. I watch them stand and start down the hallway, quietly cursing myself for not having more or better answers to their questions.

“Hey,” they say and turn around. “Aren’t you coming? Those new recyclers take two people to operate.”

_Think about what you’re doing, Morgan. Is this really what you want?_

I hesitate. I keep thinking about the mirror in the bathroom and the blackness between the stars, the reflection of something too big to truly reflect. I think about Sho and the arboretum, that split second when she saw what I was. When she knew what I wanted, what I needed, and how close she came to being eaten.

_You know how this story goes. It was the same for Mikhaila, Igwe, Sho, and about eighty percent of the mimetics department. How many times do we have to do this?_

“One more time,” I tell March, then get to my feet and follow Jaime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I have a plan for the Typhon Cycle! I know it's moving very slowly at the moment, but that can be attributed to work and general exhaustion. The circumstances of needing New Beta Reader, among other things, have made getting back into the swing of writing difficult. Thank you to everyone for bearing with me while this story plays out. I appreciate every kudo, comment, and hit. You are all marvelous.
> 
> Also, I'm accepting questions and prompts for filler material to go in the Outtakes. Chapter 20 hasn't even been thoroughly outlined yet, so there's going to be a dry spell between posts.
> 
> ~ Mittens
> 
> Suggested alternate titles from New Beta Reader:  
> \- Water You Waiting For  
> \- Once More unto the Breach  
> \- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Typhon  
> \- Simple and Clean (possibly because New Beta Reader just hates me)


	20. Our Nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim discovers the benefits of recycling, approximates the weight of a stapler, and is tasked with learning about lunar geography.

When Alex first showed me the recycler chamber, they were recycling a mimic. I remember watching it as it desperately switched forms. Coffee mug. Bowl of udon. Pair of chopsticks. And, finally, a chrysanthemum.

“It shouldn’t be able to do that,” one of the observers said very matter of factly. “Typhon cacoplasmus cannot mimic living organisms.”

“Looks like it can, whether you like it or not,” Alex snipped. I remember his voice shaking, vibrating all across the weave and constricting around us. How cold he was, how afraid. 

“That’s why we’re disposing of it, Mr. Yu.” I don’t remember the face of the person in charge, but I remember their voice. So sure, so kind, so steadfast and pleased with the sound of the key locking into place. “We can’t let it stay in the station now that we’re done studying it. It’s too dangerous.”

The world collapsed into a pinprick. A sharp thread of light that went through me and split me apart. It took a while to put myself back together, wrap the pieces tight with the threads of the weave, and remember to forget I wasn’t human. Alex had his arms around me. I was shaking. We weren’t in the recycling chamber anymore. He didn’t tell me how we got to his office, didn’t tell me what happened to my form when I couldn’t hold it. He sighed. He held my hands while they shook and twitched and tried to form fingers.

“What they said, it was about…” He stopped talking and stared at the thumb tracing circles on the back of my hand. The shaking was gone. I was still. For once. “It was about mimics. Typhon that aren’t like you. Aren’t hybrids. They’re not malicious, but they’re hungry and we’re the only food source for them on this station. I know it looks bad, but it’s survival. At the end of the day, it’s either us or them. At least until we find a way to coexist.”

“Me.” I breathe the answer in, let it settle in my lungs, and fight back the feeling of zero gravity it gives me.

“Yeah, Morgan, you.” He squeezes my hands. Words he can’t speak choke him. The threads around him are knotted and tangled. They tie us together even as they stretch ever outward into the stars. Small bright flashes pulse around him. A hundred thoughts are recycled as fast as they can form. When he speaks again the threads go slack, if only for a moment. “Maybe if we’re lucky both of our species will survive this.”

\---

“So, we’re going back after this, right?”

I don’t answer. Jaime hums and keeps walking. The static from the scope fills the air between us. I try to remember the ‘human emotion’ lessons, the subtle tics and twists that reveal hidden thoughts. I don’t know how they survived as a species, having to do this. It’s hard. It feels impossible, with some people. Jaime’s face isn’t like Alex’s, soft and wide and expressive. Jaime isn’t Igwe, who is as bright and clear as the stars that paint his face. I can glean exactly nothing from their expressions. I try to think, to notice little things, and only manage to discern the rhythm my fingers make against my hip. 

“Seriously. Why don’t you want to travel with them?” Jaime finally snaps and I feel the recoil. Their voice is too sharp and too loud. The weave explodes into bright, fragments of fractals around them. I shift across the hallway, which does me no favors.

“I don’t…” I start to tell them, but my voice crackles. Words turn to static. My body falters.

“Do you have, like, some kind of severe PTSD or something? Are your mods faulty?”

“Yes.” My thumb brushes over my fingertips, from index to pinky. One. Two. Three. Four. Thumb is five. All there. No extras. I’m still doing okay. Jaime stands waiting for an answer I already gave as I repeat the process.

_You need a hypo. Or you need to eat. What do you think would be less off-putting to your new “friend” here, shooting up Typhon material or taking a bite of that asshole in accounting?_

A hypo. It has to be a hypo. A human would use a psi-hypo.

_I feel like, maybe, you’re forgetting some very important details. Like the fact you’re not human._

“Hey, you still with us, Mim?”

“Sorry,” I choke out. My hand stops moving. My lungs dissipate. I ache to move, to shift, to change shape. I hum. Loudly. The world around me is muted, obscured entirely by the thrumming weave and the fears polluting it. I find words and force them out. “I haven’t had any medication today. The mods. Telepath. They make me sensitive, give me synesthesia. People are too complex, too bright and loud. I couldn’t be in a big group like that. I’d shut down.”

“Ah,” Jaime says and nods quickly. “Gotcha.”

I laugh and they look confused. They don’t see the threads. They don’t see the rigid framework holding together loose snips of humanity. It never really seemed that there were humans without the natural human grace of Sho or Elazar, who just are without thinking about being. It’s comforting. I thought the scripts and standby words were a Typhon coping mechanism.

_It’s not just you._ March’s voice is soft, blurred around the edges. I feel myself retreating into it. But it isn’t safe. The further I go into March, the more I feel. I see heat and light, scalding lead and muzzle flashes. I feel gold and violet, offset with the red of chrysanthemums. I feel fragments of my incomprehensible whole come back to me.

The recycling room is empty, though I can’t say I expected anyone to be there. Everyone sane has gone to the security checkpoints. Everyone who couldn’t make it is with the survivors we found. Jaime should be with them. I can’t shake that feeling that Jaime should be with the others, with the other humans. They don’t seem to share that feeling, though. Jaime approaches the recycling chamber like a curious child, fingers slowly trailing across the glass as they watch the telepath float behind it.

It’s waiting. There are no threads around it, no weave, no coral; it’s surrounded only the faint violet aura of a subjugated will. I feel myself vibrating, stretching out to fill the empty space within the room and match its frequency. But I’m still Morgan. As long as I’m with Jaime, I have to stay Morgan.

_So, here we are. The last step in your plan. Still going to go through with it?_  
I approach the recycler and scan my ID. The light blinks on and the cover over the ‘recycle’ button retracts. Jaime does the same on their side. The chamber hisses as its secondary walls close around the viewing pod. 

It waits.

I let go of my hold on the telepath. Nothing changes.

It keeps waiting.

Slowly the gold slips out between the living tendrils of ink. The telepath pulls itself together like a computer glitch, trying to find missing assets that no longer exist. I can feel where they’re missing, where I took them away. The coral doesn’t form. It can’t. The pod was designed to isolate Typhon material from the outside world. The weave barely reaches through the walls. 

“Secondary employee authorization required for this action. Employee Cobalt, please press either ‘recycle’ or ‘cancel’ at this time.”

My fingers brush the button. Something in the weave stirs. The light is darker, harder, louder. I feel it burrow under my skin. There are words in it, unformed thoughts, but I can’t translate them. They’re meant for me. I don’t know how I know, but I do. Jaime feels them too, but only as vibrations and lights behind their eyes. They don’t know what it is other than a sense of unease. They push the button and wait. I can’t disentangle myself from the weave. Or if I can it requires more effort than I think I’m capable of right now. I feel the telepath in the golden strands, even though I know they’re not connected to it. There’s something else, something beyond coral or weave or telepathic bonds that lies below the surface of anything with Typhon in it. That’s the thing Alex was looking for, the thing Igwe calls a ‘collective soul’. That’s what I feel wrapping tight around me now and invading my thoughts.

The siren screams. Jaime hits the recycle button again.

“It’s in you, isn’t it?” They stop, hand over the button, staring me down. I remember the nature documentaries from Earth before the Typhon, the snarling wolves that became snarling Typhon Pseudofauna. ‘Worse than regular Typhon,’ Alex told me. ‘They retain their predatory, pack-hunting instincts. Like phantoms.’ I think Jaime reminds me a lot of one right now. I sink. The world turns monochrome. “Push the button, Mim.”

I hesitate. My fingers reach for it, acting instinctively on the commanding tone of Jaime’s voice. Push the button. Shift across the room. Push the button. Move the boxes. Push the button. Mimic the chair. Push the button. Kill the Typhon.

The threads around us warp, snarling and knotting until there’s no telling where one starts and one ends. Hysteria pulls them around Jaime, pushes flashes of too-bright light through them that deafen me and weigh me down. They don’t see it. They can’t. Jaime’s hand trembles as they push the recycle button again. And again. And again. Their hand is shaking too bad now. Their eyes are too wide. Their lips are pulled back over their gums, teeth bared.

“Push the damned button.”

“No,” I whisper. My voice struggles to come out and turns into static on my lips. I can see the phantom in my room. I remember the thought in its mind as it slipped through the cracks and sprung me from my own room: ‘Free now.’ I take a step away from the control console towards the door. The telepath stares unthinkingly at me.

“No?”

“No,” I repeat.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Jaime’s voice crackles. Water builds in their eyes, tears that aren’t ready to fall, and they step away from me. Indecision surrounds them. They have the same expression Mikhaila did when she heard me speak for the first time in Morgan’s voice. I’m about to move around the recycler to explain myself when Jaime hurls the stapler at me. If I was less malleable, I’d have a broken collarbone. The suit registers pressure, but not enough to cause damage. They take another step back. The hurt fades to fear. The courage from having a weapon is gone. “Mim, what the fuck? Why are you protecting it? You’re not mind controlled. Are you one of Park’s cronies? Is that it? You going to let them eat us and see what they turn into? Are you working for Yu, trying to make a man out of one of these monsters? It doesn’t work! You know it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t. Everyone but those space-sick assholes up top know it. If that thing escapes, all it’ll do is kill us. That’s all any of them will do. Even Cathy, phantom-Cathy, she sounded like herself but…but it was all Typhon. She didn’t want help; she wanted food.”

I feel it move in me, those words that were trapped in the coral. My mouth can’t form them without shifting, but it tries. They taste like batteries. They wash the world in purple and gold. A bizarre, poly-chromatic facsimile of the station fills my mind. I feel it looking through my eyes the way I used to look through Sokolov’s. It sees me. It sees Jaime, **sees** them the way I do. I want to do the same for Jaime, let them feel what’s inside the telepath, but it doesn’t work that way. There just aren’t enough neuromods in them to even try. Instead I stand there, seeing three versions of the world around me and wondering which one is mine. I feel everything it feels, almost everything Jaime feels. The broken psychoscope keeps too much of them from me, too much of everything else from them. I feel hunger, but no worse than my own. I feel anger and fear, but not Jaime’s. I push the rest away, focus on the emotions stirring inside the telepath.

When I finally tap into the tattered weave around it, I hit my knees. I shake. I am more solidly Morgan than I have been in ages, too solid. Too human. The shaking worsens. The hunger is secondary. It’s buried. Forgotten. There is only rage inside the telepath. There shouldnt be enough of a connection for it to be this strong, but it is. It sees Jaime and it wants them dead. It wants me dead. There is a hatred I never thought I could feel inside the telepath for anything resembling humans. I feel it seeping into me and, for a moment, I remember the anger I felt at Alex when I found out about April.

I want to destroy. To consume.

I struggle to my feet and slam my palm down onto the button. The recycler puts up the final barrier before dropping in a charge. The telepath and its rage are all gone in a bright flash. But I know that that isn’t true. Its back inside the Coral. Its memories, its hate, and everything else in it returned back home. I slide back onto the floor, willing the emotions I felt from the telepath out of my body.

Was that part of me once? Is that anger, the voice telling me I don’t need to save Alex, some residual emotion from the Typhon I used to be? Or is it human?

If Typhon feel emotions, can mimic humans, can pretend to be alive, what does that make them?  
I don’t know the answers. I’m not a philosopher like Igwe or a biochemist like Alex. Right now, I know that their hatred makes them a threat. I know it makes any hope I had of just talking it out with them a moot point.

I lay my head against the side of the recycler and soak in the feel of cold metal. For once, I long for physical stability. The taste of metal slides through my skin. The lack of give and the coldness lingering from the recycling process help dull the world around me. The paint is alkaline, maybe. Tinged with oils and chemicals and dyes that make it taste like used ink cartridges. Everything is white, like the recycler paint, and solid. Easy to see, to digest. I can almost feel the Telepath’s influence leaving me to make room for the new sensations. Outside of me, the world continues. 

I hear Jaime yelling at someone over the TranScribe. Tatsuya, I think. They’re still angry, though now they sound concerned as well. Their words are garbled. I don’t know if its another language or if my mind is still too stuck to understand them. They gesticulate wildly while speaking, more than I do. It hurts to try to decipher it. There’s too much going on. There always is, but this time it feels worse. Interfacing with the Typhon woke up some part of me that’s too aware of the worlds around me.

Somewhere in the blinding, deafening gold, I hear March.

_So. This is how it’s going to end?_

What are you talking about?

_Recycling the telepath. Severing the link. We’re back to an ‘us vs. them’ situation, then?_

If it has to. If there’s no other way.

_What if I told you that, under all that anger, it was scared as you are?_

I don’t think I’d believe you.

_You should._

I should have listened to Alex before any of this got as bad as it did. Typhon, actual Typhon, aren’t like me. That phantom back there, it’d probably do the same thing if there was a human present.

_You really believe that?_

I don’t dignify March with a response this time. I don’t. I know I don’t believe that. March knows I don’t believe that. But the best way to survive and try to mount a rescue is to pretend I do.

_Alex doesn’t understand the Typhon, other than in a strictly biological way. He can’t see them. Not like you can. Not like we can. And, trust me, he’s tried. All those answers he can’t give you about Morgan and Cobalt? They’re in the trash with all the Typhon mods he’s ripped out._

How do you know all this?

_Because I remember what they made you forget, what you hid away in the weave out of their reach during every wipe._

_I'm the March to your April. I came before you. And I'll be May and remain after._

That doesn't make any sense. I know they made me out of Morgan, out of April. Where did you come from?

_Moltke._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this took entirely too long. I finished the chapter almost a month ago, but kept coming back to tweak, rewrite, and reconsider narrative choices. I’m still not sure I made the right ones, but I feel like I made the ones that suited the overall story the best and will hopefully lead to the end I want for ‘Replica’. 
> 
> Thank you to all of the loyal readers who waited this long for a new chapter. Hopefully there will be no more large ethical quandaries to delay future updates.
> 
> NBR’s alternate titles: “Every time we touch I feel the mimic”, “Me Myself and March”


	21. Parting Ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mim gets a new TranScribe, eats the worst noodle ever, and struggles to catch an elevator. (He also gets to say 'fuck'. March disapproves.)

I already know that Jaime and I part ways at the security station. I didn’t need telepathy to tell what they were thinking. The silence on the way here was bigger than both of us, brighter than the Coral. Whatever they think I am, it isn’t something safe or human.

The others greet me with mixed reactions. Two of them leave the room as soon as they see me. One of the security crew reaches for her pistol only to have the Martian mushroom salesman hold a hand up to stand down.

“I believe Mr. Cobalt was leaving,” he says, plastic smile never wavering. Jaime grunts. I nod. 

“I need a TranScribe. I can give you a broken one, if someone here can fix it.” My voice sounds like his without me meaning to. He cocks his head to the side. The smile cracks for a single second and then he pats me on the shoulder.

“Of course. Our dear Ms. Zhou could fix it easily. Can’t you?”

The person at the computer rolls her eyes and waves her hand without looking away from the screen. “Piece of cake. Consider it fixed. I want your eel rolls, though.”

“See? Eel rolls and a broken scribe for a working one. That sounds more than fair.”

I keep trying to get a read on him, to find any scrap of thought or emotion, but there's nothing. He doesn't even have a psychoscope. He's just empty. Like a mannequin. The air is still. Not oppressively, like Sho. Not disrupted. Just still. Even the coral won't go near him. I don't like it.

_You know how most people have a little voice that whipsers when they should leave? Leave. Get out. Now._

I take the TranScribe he offers and give Miss Zhou the three boxes of eel rolls. Something moves near her as she takes them, a bright pinprick that has no business there. I'm tired. I'm seeing things. Or that's what I'd tell myself if it wasn't so bright. The whole room is silent. Still.

I shove the TranScribe in my suit and stare at Jaime.

"What's your callsign?" My voice resonates with the ambient frequencies in the room. Jaime is used to it. Mushroom man almost frowns.

"ACC 3," Jaime mumbles. They side eye me, face a mix of confusion and something else. "What's your new one?"

"SEC 8."

They nod, tap it into the contact list, and wait. I enter theirs. We say nothing else. We stare until it becomes obvious that one of us will change their mind soon. I can't. I won't. I need to get to Alex. I need to find Sho. Jaime doesn't. I walk out slowly, just in case.

_We're off to a good start. That should have all of the tracking bracelets already in it._

"I don't think we should have left," I speak aloud to March for the first time since I met Jaime. I forgot how much it helps me modulate my voice, trying to match March.

_What do you propose? Stay in the shelter and wait it out?_

"No..." I fidget, check the number of fingers I have. The trackers show Igwe and Elazar both in the lower commons along with a group of other dots whose names I don't recognize. I don't see Sho, but I know she hates her bracelet. It might be in a pond in the arboretum or a safety box in deep storage. Alex is in his office, in the far back room behind the shelf, just outside of the station map most people see. Morgan's office is somewhere behind it. His heart rate is less than optimal, but his vitals as a whole are good.

I could try again, even if the elevator is offline and the stairs are on fire. I'm starting to think that neither of those things are a problem for...whatever I am.

_So, you're finally putting two and two together?_

March is as smug as ever. It's familiar enough to be comforting. He sounds like Morgan when he’s like that. More than I do, anyway. I sigh and turn back to the transcribe. There’s a detailed map of evacuation routes and emergency exits within the station, just in case of power failure or Typhon. It doesn’t take too long to find one that’ll get me to Alex without having to scale the inside of an elevator shaft, though it will take me straight through Dr. Park’s lab and up to the arboretum. I remember the arboretum from the SIM and the Apex. I know it isn’t out there anymore. I know that, theoretically, we’re safe, but a sense of dread has been building inside me since I recycled the telepath and I can’t shake it.

“This is turning into a nightmare.”

_You know, sometimes I really wish you had a sense of irony._

“And I wish you were half as helpful as January, but we can’t always get what want. It’s like that band Sho likes says.”

_It also says that you get what you need. So maybe we’ll find a nice lab technician to eat while we’re trying to save Alex. Or you could use that hypo._

I groan at the thought. I have a very finite supply of psi-hypo. That’s the only reason I’m following the path that leads through Dr. Park’s lab: the possibility of a resupply. March is nudging me towards a different idea and I can feel him picking at the threads of our mind. Not ours. Mine. This brain and body is mine, not Morgan’s or even March’s. I ignore the way the weave shifts from gold to violet as March spreads and the feeling of weightlessness that he draws my attention to--how empty my body is without any noodles or coffee or consciousness. My body expelled the excess water at some point and the suit processed it away. I could drink more. Should drink more. I feel like I could float away. Like I could assimilate into the slowly forming Coral.

I pop the hypo in my mouth once I’m sure I’m alone. I spit out the silicon capped needle before crunching on the glass. My almost-digestive-system gets to work immediately. I feel the ‘exotic material’ replenish bits of me that I lost controlling the telepath. Most of the cracks in my being come together and the ones that don’t get filled with ground glass. March pulls at the threads between us disapprovingly.

_How about tracking down a rogue operator, since rogue human is out of the question?_

There aren’t any around. I can’t feel them. It’s a good idea, though. If there were any operators that could make a meal, they’d be further up in the research labs. Like Thaddeus, who I’d almost feel bad about eating twice.

“March?”

_Yes?_

“Can we eat Typhon?”

There’s silence. No images. No memories. Just silence for a long while. Finally, the threads bunch together and March speaks again.

_We can assimilate them, up to a certain point. Mimics. Cystoids. Phantoms, within reason._

“How do you know?”

_Park._

I wait for the rest of the explanation, but it doesn’t come. What does come is a flood of images. Tests. Technicians. Hunger. Faces and thoughts and bits of digested coral. I taste static and mercury. I feel names slide off my tongue and down my throat. March pulls. I choke on the memories of a me before myself. I think about Park and pens, about that time I ate a marker off of her desk and how the ink dripped down my chin. I think about containment and eating a mimic, about the ink dripping through my teeth.[yum]

March goes silent. My thoughts echo in the recesses of my self. I know it was my idea, but I don’t like it. Eating Typhon sounds-- **feels** \--wrong.

_It is._ March says. The weave thrums with his voice. Voices. The one that isn’t Morgan’s is louder this time. It’s taking shape the same way March seems to be. I put a hand to my face and feel the stubble, how much it’s grown without growing. I wonder what I look like.

I wonder who I look like. 

Somewhere March’s sardonic laugh echoes and bounces off stray bits of Coral.

_Identity crisis later. Typhon crisis now. After that stunt with the Telepath, we’re going to be Talos’ Most Wanted._

I grip my faithful shoe and let my consciousness expand through the halls in front of me. March is right. March is so right. I feel the hatred flowing through the Coral, but it isn’t trying to get inside of me now. It’s aimed at me. At us. That’s the part that turns my core to lead, makes it sink and float at the same time. It knows March, whatever March is. It recognizes him. It wants us split. Well, not split. I don’t think there’s a human word for what the Coral wants, exactly.

“Hey, March?”

_Yes?_

“What the fuck?”

_Language, Morgan. What would Alex say?_

“At this point, probably the same thing. But in German.”

I get more disembodied laughter through the weave in response. It’s genial. More importantly, it stops before it flows very far. I pull back into myself, retract the mental feelers I set out.

There are two mimics ahead of us outlined in the faint gold of newly spun coral. One’s a vase and one’s a chair. My fingers tighten on the shoe. I walk past the first one, the vase, without incident. Something moves around it in the weave. It’s speaking to something too low and in a language I can’t translate. The chair wobbles, glitches slightly, and falls onto its side. I move to the other side of the hall as I approach and hope that being out of reach will discourage it. I’m wrong, of course.

As soon as I get up to the chair a tendril wraps around my leg. No time to think. No time to act. The other one is on my back, wrapped around my neck, forcing a tendril down my throat. I think of Bellamy again. I taste ink and gunpowder and electricity. I feel myself moving with instincts I don’t have. My hand raises the pistol and brings it down on the mimic at my back. Its stunned. I shift away. March licks our lips for us. Our teeth are too sharp. The mimic sprouts a new limb. The old one writhes inside us, trying to get back to its owner.

It lunges. I swing. The steel toe finds its mark and hits the mimic’s center with a wet thunk. It twitches as it falls. The other mimic lurches forward and stops, suspended in the air. We turn it over once, twice, and watch it. The Hate shifts inside it. March plucks the strings of weave around it until they vibrate louder than the mimic’s hunger. I see Coral wrapped trees again, visions of Terra. I feel its hate grow. The poltergeist-like suspension falters. It coils inside itself and becomes a box of tissue. It cracks as a too-sharp tendril jolts through it. It leaves behind ink and broken Coral.

March runs a tongue across our teeth.

I run my tongue across my teeth. I wipe ink from my mouth and spit. The mimic’s lost limb slowly melts into the rest of my form. Some of the psychic fatigue leaves my body.

“I don’t like this,” I groan as I retrieve my shoe. “This isn’t right.”

_No. It isn’t. But this is our life now._ March gives me a second to think of unkind phrases in German before pulling me forward. _We need to keep moving. Unless you wanted to have a snack._

I’m ashamed of how much I want to. The mimic leg is already dissolved and I feel my body demanding more. I step over the remains of the two mimics as I make my way down the hall. I feel March’s silent approval.

_You’ve got to commit to something, eventually._

“I’ve committed to finding Alex and Danielle.”

March responds by twisting around inside my thoughts and drawing my attention to the not-quite-foreign matter slowly distributing itself through my system. If I concentrate, I can feel the coldness inside me. Bits of that intangible darkness between the stars.

_Feels like home, right?_

We move through the halls. I want to ignore March, but he knows what we’re doing better than I do. My footsteps never make a sound on the tile. It makes it easier to hear the faint chirping when there are mimics or the humming of the weave. A chair turns into ink, runs into an office, and turns into a stapler. I don’t walk into that room. I head for the emergency lift to Park’s personal lab. The layout of Talos is more confusing than I remember. I knew it wouldn’t be quite the same as Talos I, but I didn’t take into account the security measures and secret passages. At least I’m not crawling through air vents.

I see them outside the entrance to the lift. A technician, flash mummified by mimic absorption. Their fingers are still on the door handle. Their face is stretched and twisted. I stumble back and knock my head against a fire extinguisher.

Their TranScribe blinks.

I steady myself and move closer. There are no threads around. The mimic that killed the tech is long gone. I’m almost at the door when I see them, the bits of weave slowly seeping out of the technician. The black skin warps into black ink. I jerk the door open and slam it shut behind me. The weave hums with the sound of etheric energy. I can’t see the phantom forming outside, but I can feel it. Remnants of human consciousness are picked apart and pulled into the framework. I hear an old waltz. I smell freshly baked bread. I feel panic and hope and despair. Finally, as the lift shudders to life, I hear the phantom voices.

“This can’t be happening,” it crackles. A pause. A snap of etheric energy trying to penetrate metal. “Officer Nguyen, we have an emergency in sector 4C.”

I back into the corner of the lift and try to shut its thoughts out. They fill the air like a miasma. Human consciousness shouldn't return to the Coral. It didn't stem from there, doesn't belong there. It doesn't want to be there. And it fights back. It pulls away and the strongest, most indigestible parts remain: the Panic.

"They've broken through," the phantom hisses. It says more, but the elevator's announcement cuts it off.

"We have arrived at Dr. Park's lab, Dr. Yu. Should I page her to let her know you're here?"

"Sure," I say in my best Morgan voice. I stumble out of the lift, body flowing around me like magnetized ferrofluid. I'm picking up too much from the weave. From the **Coral**. There's something up here that's pulling it in, gathering it into something more cohesive than stray bits of thought.

_You think it'd be the docking bay, since that's ground zero for the latest outbreak._

"Yeah..."

I let my body drop out of focus. The klaxons, the flickering light, and the reek of chemical fire extinguishers all fade into the background. I resonate at the same frequency as the weave. I slip by the phantom stalking the halls as the after-image of a mimic. I take the place of Park's mug when another set of footsteps enters the room.

There's a scream. A dull thud and hiss of hydraulics. The crack of porcelain. Something almost soft knocks me off of the desk onto the floor. I hear ragged breathing. The ground breath me reverberates with the heavy footfalls of someone in security boots. I feel warmth. I feel the shaking fingers wrap around me and set me back on the desk.

"What the hell..." a voice says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please accept this inordinately long chapter as an apology for how long it has taken to update. Things are finally rolling again with writing, so hopefully the next chapter won't take as long.
> 
> That said, there is a new project in the works! Mittens is making a _**comic**_ version of Replica, which will include a new introduction and some editing of the first couple chapters. There is no current timeframe for when it will be posted, but I'll likely put it up on my not-quite-dead Tumblr.
> 
> As always, thank you to everyone for your patience and faithful readership.
> 
> Alternate Titles from NBR:  
> Snack Attack  
> They See Me Mimickin', They Hatin'  
> Once You Pop (a Typhon) You Can't Stop
> 
> Aside, a song that keeps playing as I write these new chapters is Rise Against - "The Violence". It is not needed to appreciate the chapter's contents, but it provides a good soundtrack for them.


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